Poster for the movie Nice: Crazy Heart
The reference news network reported on January 10 that in the Western Middle Ages, a group of people were regarded as possessed by the devil, expelled, burned, hanged, and collectively loaded into ships and exiled to the depths of the sea. In the 20th century, they were called mentally ill and were sent to a mental hospital. But early medical developments didn't make their lives much better: captivity and beatings were mainstream. For at least a few hundred years, the treatment of mental illness has been one of the most important in the dark history of science.
In 1944, World War II had not yet stopped, and the invaders were still carrying out the final massacre. In a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, doctor Ness da Silvera is setting off a revolution — she wants to change the status quo of psychiatric treatment. Nice refused to use the then new type of electric shock therapy to treat people with schizophrenia. She tries to help the sick with painting, animals, and trust. Her peers sneered at her non-mainstream operations, but she won an abandoned warehouse and converted it into an occupational treatment area to work. Just when the patients were turning around, the hospital issued an order to shut down the treatment area.
Stills from the movie Nice: Crazy Heart
A true story
The movie "Nice: Crazy Heart" (hereinafter referred to as "Nice"), which is being released, is based on real people and real events. Nice was a student of the world-famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who graduated from the Bahia Medical School in 1926 as the only woman out of 158 graduates. She has always opposed the mainstream therapies of psychiatry in the 1930s and 1950s: frontal lobotomy, electric shock, and insulin injections, and advocated the use of occupational therapy and animal therapy to care for and guide patients. Although the psychoanalytic theory followed by Nice also faced obsolescence in the second half of the twentieth century, her humanitarian spirit of improving patient feelings was still passed down to future generations.
"Nice" is China's first officially introduced Brazilian film, and the reputation is good: Douban score 8.3, Rotten Tomatoes audience rating is 100%. In 2015, "Nice" won the Best Picture and Best Actress awards at the Tokyo International Film Festival. In 2017, at the 2nd BRICS International Film Festival held in Chengdu, the film won the Best Film Award.
It can't help but be reminiscent of the 1974 blockbuster movie "Flying Over the Lunatic Asylum" that caused a sensation in the United States, in which the protagonist pretended to be ill to escape prison labor, was sent to a mental hospital, and his "thorn-headed" nature led to repeated electric shocks, and finally he was forced to undergo a frontal lobotomy. The story of the movie "Nice" is also similar - after the operation, the patient's thinking and emotional abilities are completely eliminated, the behavior is stereotyped and the eyes are sluggish, and they are reduced to the walking dead. As she observes, it's not so much treatment as regulation: surgery as soon as possible, and then discharge as quickly as possible.
"Flying Over the Madhouse" focuses on social criticism: medicine has become a rational tool for destroying people under the structure of modern society, and the film fundamentally questions the definition of "mental illness". "Nice" has a smaller and more specific perspective. Unlike the former, it does not doubt psychosis itself, but the arrogance that focuses on medical authority makes it impossible to alleviate the patient's suffering in the slightest.
But "Nice" does not make people feel hopeless or depressed, one is that it has a clear attitude when portraying the process of the struggle between good and evil: how the interest clamping of mental hospitals has caused the medical reform to fail miserably, and how the reform pioneers have won the support of public opinion. The second is because of the moderation, low-profile photography, the huge personality charm of the protagonist, and the poetic treatment of the patient's painting process. Despite the failure of the final reform and the beginning of new changes, the tone of the whole film is still warm.
A one-man battle
The overall rhythm of the film is gentle, with almost no cross-time and space editing, and strives to restore the experience of doctors observing and intervening in patients. "Nice" depicts a lot of patients' daily lives: who hides in the corner of the wall and mutters to themselves, who is playing football, who is wrestling with others, who is pestering the nurse, who is beating whom. Therefore, the performance is extremely important, fortunately, the director is a casting genius: the real patient and the fake patient (actor) perform on the same stage, making it impossible to distinguish who is real and who is fake, and each actor shows the shadow and fire in the patient's heart.
In Nice, the transformation process of the mentally ill person is like the natural growth of a baby. The film constantly switches between brush strokes across the canvas and the patient's swaying dance —exploring oneself and touching the world is a human instinct. It's hard for the audience to miss the change of the actors: carefully trying to accept in the face of paper and pencil, putting on strange costumes, touching animals, paint, mud, rain, sunshine when the eyes are smart. Through painting, they gradually break through the communication barrier and express themselves in a language that ordinary people can understand.
Another power of the everyday lens is to blur the boundaries between the so-called normal and the abnormal: in the confrontation between the nurse and the patient, many patients can make their words clear, and their truth and frankness are shameful, while the normal people seem to be just pretending to be confused.
After setting up the workplace, the caregivers who had abused patients also changed – they found that patients were not a threat and did not need to be treated roughly. But reform is still a battle for Nice alone, the cold-eyed dean can easily destroy her efforts, and the family members do not quite understand what she is doing.
Dr. Nice believes that patients are unable to communicate in normal ways, but they are not lacking emotions, but are controlled by the subconscious. In order to regain the patient's ability to express emotions, Nice put pet dogs in the hospital. Almost every two patients are accompanied by a dog. Today we know that pets have a certain positive psychological effect on people, but at that time, Dr. Nice's judgment was shocking. The dean ordered Nice to dispose of them because it was difficult to clean up the feces of the cats and dogs.
Nice said: "Without animals, is the hospital clean?" The dean was speechless. Nice went on to remind him: "If these dogs suddenly disappear, their condition will take a sharp turn for the worse." The dean was annoyed and angry: "This is my patient." If you get in, you will bear the consequences! "A few days later, early in the morning, a female patient walked into the courtyard, looking increasingly frightened that all the dogs had been killed. The corpses were strewn away with the patients, and some returned to violence, pressing the caregivers to the ground and almost stoned to death.
The next shot is shocking: that night, Lucio, who attacked the nurse, is arrested and performed a frontal lobotomy. At the moment when he screamed in pain, Nice, who was waiting outside the operating room, could not suppress his grief and screamed.
The settings of this bridge segment lead to deeper information. Nice's entire career was considered crazy by his peers, after all, the starting point was different - one was discipline and punishment, and the other was improvement and healing. In the midst of this debate, the patient's ownership and treatment dominance are distorted by one party into a tool for power struggle. This seems commonplace in the film's all-out war years, and medical injustices have been shelved.
An extraordinary exhibition
The failure of the therapeutic reforms made Nice re-aware of the importance of outside public opinion—and eventually she had to turn to people outside the walls of the hospital, especially in the art world, which had already cited psychoanalysis. Later, in the exhibition held by the joint critics, the patients all deployed their real names, and people expressed their appreciation. They even use psychoanalysis to interpret the work—the images of different styles are the "subconscious" of the patient. The rhetoric of the elegant occasion is unclear, but Nice, who treats the patient as a loved one, gets the result she wants.
The film is not entirely about medical humanitarianism, it also repeatedly presents the experience of nice as a woman, and director Berliner is keenly aware of the fatal blow of gender construction to the failure of Nice's reform. In the film, Nice writes down her research observations and sends them to Jung, who is overjoyed by Jung's reply. In the letter, however, Jung mistakenly believed that Nice was a man. Nice said helplessly that even Jung was sexist. These details are fascinating because they are historical facts, and because they are still happening.