News@FMUL invited Dr. António Pais de Lacerda*, an “expert” in films related to medicine, to contribute with some movie suggestions for its readers. In addition to being the founder and president of MedCine Film Festival (Cascais, 2009), this FMUL lecturer has developed and maintains an updated lists of this type of movies that is given to students in Module III-I, in the first year of the Integrated Master Degree in Medicine.

News@FMUL thanks him for his precious support to medical culture and the “seventh art”. 

Side Effects, by Steven Soderbergh 

Emily Taylor: “What do you doctors call faking? Malingering? Such a funny word. Girls learn to fake things at a very early age – probably around the same time that boys are learning to lie.” 

One day, while talking to students studying cinema, Steven Soderbergh told them that in addition to the contents they had to learn, it was paramount they understood their behaviours as individuals. In fact, for most of us, our lives are about “storytelling”. So he asked them: “what are the stories do you want to be told about you?”

What stories does Soderbergh want to be told about him? What does he say of us when he carries us to his movies?

Having become known at the early age of 26 when the won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989 with “Sex, Lies and Videotape” (written in just 8 days), it was with “Traffic – No one gets away clean” (2000) that Steven Soderbergh gained the recognition he deserved when he received the American Academy Award for “Best Director” (nominated for two movies in the same year!).

During his prolific career as a filmmaker (he says he stopped in 2013 to go on sabbatical), he maintained a constant production ranging from “independent” movies (“Kafka”, 1993, “Bubble”, 2006) and big blockbusters (“Erin Brockovich”, 2000, the saga “Ocean”, 2001/04/07, “Contagion”, 2011 and “Behind the Candelabra”, 2013). All his films denote an unusual attention to the universe of the human mind in a world of contemporary reality and its conditioning factors of (im)balance.

“Side effects” (2013) also raises (first 35 minutes) several issues about the (sick) mind and its more or less elaborate situational reactions, also exposing the problem behind the relationships between pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession, ethics in doctor-patient relationships (and their responsibilities) and the social/individual “obsessive” need of medication for mental illness, particularly depression (…and solitude).

The script then adopts the structure of a thriller, becoming a film (that could well be a revisited “sex and lies” of the 80s) with Hitchcock type characters moving on in the style of “Brian De Palma”, making it impossible to unveil the line between true and false. It is an intelligent script that makes the viewer feel closer to the “nicer” or more “credible” (?) side, but not necessarily truer.

Indeed, Soderbergh knows how to subtly convey the required emotions through images, lights and colours to make us identify with, and take sides, in the events, making us enter a kind of hypnotic state that is greatly helped by the slow (oneiric) pace of the early scenes. When we think that we can predict the evolution of the plot, we forget about the unpredictability of human reactions, which Soderbergh shows to the limit.

The context is linear: a psychiatrist with a private clinic, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), is treating Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), a patient he had seen in hospital when she was admitted for attempted suicide when her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) returned home after a period of seclusion.

After a few therapy sessions, and having discussed the case with the patient’s previous psychiatrist Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Emily started a new therapy with an antidepressant (Ablixa) recently introduced in the market. The medication nevertheless has dramatic side effects that eventually lead her to commit a crime, of which she has no recollection and for which she cannot be held accountable….

The sets of errors (through very real dialogues) will only be revealed later – curiously through deductive clinical acumen, which we learn so much about during our medical training.

Of the great movies he directed already in the 21st century, after “Solaris” (2002), “Che” (2008) and “Magic Mike” (2012), this “Side Effects” is actually an amazing exercise in Soderbergh’s style, marking the end (hopefully just of the first part) of the career of a brilliant filmmaker.

When we, doctors, finish seeing this movie, we realize that it also has an important side effect on us: to remind us of our condition of being “fallible”, because, after all, we are only human.

* Assistant Lecturer of the Subjects of Module III-I “Clinical Medicine – The Physician, the Person, and the Patient” and of Intensive Medicine at FMUL.

Trailer