Arts 15 Life At The Movies `Empathy' In a mixture of documentary and fiction, filmmaker explores the tricky boundaries between psychoanalysts and their patients. JULIE WIENER Artistic Muzeum Dreidel '21 99 Dog Dreidel 99 $ 21 Handcrafted Wire Dreidel '29" Special to the Jewish News T he setting: A therapist's empty office. The scene: Offscreen, a psychoanalyst is counseling a patient on the phone. When he returns to the chair, the analyst asks the invisible camerawoman if she was recording the conversation. "No," she lies. So begins the rather confus- ing and often frustrating Empathy, experimental film- maker Arnie Siegel's exploration of psychoanalysis. The Detroit Film Theatre screens the film 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 11, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. While Empathy raises interesting ques- tions about the renowned talking cure, one can gain more insights about its complexities — and certainly have a bet- ter time — from watching a few episodes of The Sopranos. Everything you need for Chanukah at the Jewish.com Store phone orders: 4IN 10/ 8 2004 66 866-JUDAICA online: www.jewish.corn much, despite witnessing several of her therapy sessions. Perpetually stiff and uncomfortable looking, Lia makes some vague references to a difficult mother and remote father, but never reveals any interesting, telling details about her life, and certainly never offers us any reason to care about her. Rather than getting to the heart of who Lia is and why she is in therapy, the filmmaker instead subjects us to count- less scenes accompanied by significant- sounding music yet not much action or insight: Lia sitting in a cafe looking out on traffic, Lia riding an elevator, Lia swimming in an indoor pool. Scenes in which she talks to friends and family (and oddly, despite mention of a boyfriend, we never see her interacting with him) seem stilted. Even her therapy sessions are so dull that I found myself pitying the psychiatrist. In fact, all the people in the Lia story seem less like fully realized characters On The Couch with Arnie Siegel JULIE WIENER Special to the Jewish News M Grebler Ceramic Fancy Dreidel '42" Empathy pivots on three main axes: the fictional story of Lia, an underem- ployed 38-year-old actress seeing a thera- pist for reasons never fully explained; documentary interviews with three real- life, middle-aged, male (perhaps Jewish?) analysts; and a film within a film detail- ing the shared intellectual heritage of psychoanalysis and modernist architec- ture. Scattered into the mix is confusing footage of women auditioning for the role of Lia, a gushing (fictional?) interview that the actress playing Lia gives on a tele- vision talk show and images of people walking down a hall and into a thera- pist's office. All in all, it is too much for one movie, leaving the viewer feeling bom- barded with questions and ideas, none of which are ever fully explored or devel- oped. Perhaps most disappointing is the tale of Lia, about whom we never learn idway through my meeting with Arnie Siegel, the creator of Empathy, I wonder if we should be sit- ting in Eames chairs. The modernist, leather-upholstered recliners were long a must-have for therapists, and several minutes of Siegel's quirky and somewhat frustrating quasi-documentary about psycho- analysis revolves around this piece of furniture. Instead, we are sitting on ordinary wooden chairs in one of the many hip cafes of Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighbor- hood teeming with intense, grunge-wearing artists and writ- ers. Siegel is here for a few days on break from a two-year stint in Germany, where she is participating in an artists' fellowship program and working on her next film. A youthful-looking 30, Siegel is no newcomer to Sigmund Freud's famous talking cure. She grew up in a secular Jewish home in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago, a community in which many of her friends had analyst parents and in which therapy was viewed as almost a "rite of passage." However, while she has been in therapy herself, Siegel insists that Empathy is not based on her own experiences. Indeed, she is fairly private about her personal life, refusing in our interview to answer questions about her family or even to say whether or not her own parents are analysts. "Psychoanalyze the film, not me," she said. As a documentary filmmaker (Empathy is her first feature- length project), Siegel said she was drawn to the topic out of what she saw as problematic power dynamics shared by film- makers and analysts. "There's always one person who knows more about the other and who's asking questions or listening and can present a situation where they're being very empathic," she said. "They're not. They're being manipulative to the person who's revealing things. That situation seemed to me kind of ripe to be explored -- the comparison between the two things." Siegel said she was intrigued by many of the issues posed by the patient-therapist relationship, such as the boundaries between truth and fiction, public and private space, bound- aries and "how people perform themselves or the ideas of themselves [and] to what extent they create fictions for other people or to what extent there really is an authentic self." Siegel's current project, tentatively titled The Captives, explores issues of identity from a different perspective: looking at the lives of Jews and other ethnic minorities in contempo- rary Germany. Although she is not particularly interested in the religious aspects of Judaism, Siegel says it is impossible for a Jew to live in Germany without thinking about Jewish history and with- out feeling a cultural connection to Judaism. Although she has not encountered anti-Semitism there, she said she is disturbed by Germans' "personal silence" about the Holocaust.