HYSTERIA directed by Tanya Wexler, written by Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer, with Hugh Dancy, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jonathan Pryce, Felicity Jones and Rupert Everett. An eOne Films release. 99 minutes. Opens Friday (May 25). For venues and times, see Movies.
Hugh Dancy is as clean-cut as they come.
I’ve spoken to the British star and Oxford graduate on a few occasions and what always strikes me is his polished manners, posh accent and utter professionalism. He consistently shrugs off questions about how women go gaga over him – that’s all beside the point.
So the sight of Dancy bringing middle-aged Victorian-era women to orgasm in Hysteria is a hoot, especially since the man committing the deed is Dr. Mortimer Granville, whose hands-on method for curing female hysteria eventually led him to patent the first electric vibrator.
On the phone from New York City, where he’s starring in the Tony Award-nominated Venus In Fur, yet another raunchy comedy, the versatile actor acknowledges that he’s been doing a lot of naughty material lately. Yet despite its subject matter, he admires the way Hysteria steers away from “cheap thrills, titillation or bawdy sex-comedy,” describing its tone as sweet and innocent instead. I’d agree – the film is a rom-com at heart.
Dancy and his co-star Maggie Gyllenhaal engage in verbal tête-à-têtes reminiscent of the snappy exchanges in Howard Hawks movies like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, classics that the actor admits served as major inspirations.
“In modern romantic comedies, it always comes down to blatant rudeness or radical misunderstandings,” he says of the contrived plot mechanisms that steer the genre today. “In the older romantic comedies, it’s more this constant slight rudeness and patronizing quality without any sense of real malice beneath it.”
Dancy goes on to connect the “high-stakes banter” in old-school rom-coms with a shifting world view. His Girl Friday dealt with women in the workforce. Hysteria tackles the male-driven Victorian medical establishment’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of the female orgasm. Unsatisfied women were simply considered hysterical.
“I think there always has been and always will be a kind of reactionary fear of female sexuality among certain types of men,” says Dancy, who agrees that similar sexual hypocrisies exist today. “Just listen to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program for a few hours.”
Hysteria is just the latest in Dancy’s recent string of indie films, after Adam and Martha Marcy May Marlene. The actor who was once a regular in studio movies like Black Hawk Down and Confessions Of A Shopaholic seems to have settled into a Sundance-ready groove.
“I think in the last couple of years the gap between independent and studio films has widened,” says Dancy. “Finding the $20 to $30 million films seems harder and harder. It’s either be in a comic book movie or take a punt on a much smaller budget.”
While Dancy assures me that he didn’t turn down The Avengers, he also makes it clear that he’s not going out of his way to become the leading man on the IFC channel.
“There’s no glory in just being in a bunch of indie films for the sake of your cred,” Dancy says, taking on a stern tone. “That doesn’t interest me in the slightest.”
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