Hysteria: severe form of neurosis characterized by somatic complaints and psychic conflicts unrelated to anatomical injuries or organic facts.

Term derived from the Greek hystera, uterus.

Having said that, the film does not tell the story of hysteria nor does it do the anatomy of the uterus but brilliantly illustrates how the first battery-powered vibrator, patented in the late 1800s by a highly respected English physician, one Joseph Mortimer Granville, was invented, called precisely "Granville's hammer" to train blockages and muscle aches.

It is the story of an application of women's medicine for diagnosed hysterics: it initially consisted of manual massage that required great "skill" on the part of the physician until the intuition of an electric instrument had through taking a look at the design of a feather duster. There's no denying it!

All this in Victorian times among women in the throes of weeping, nymphomania, frigidity, melancholy, anxiety.

The story of two sisters-Emily and Charlotte, one considered the ideal woman, the other, thought to be hysterical because she was nonconformist, revolutionary, socialist, and feminist without her knowledge, and therefore at risk of hysterectomy.

A woman asserting her rights and those of the weakest, uncomfortable and anti-bourgeois who makes the young doctor discover, only in words, the true sexuality of women.

Hysteria is a fiction, he argued, a historical forgery; women are only unsatisfied by puritanical, selfish, misogynistic men.

Brilliant, English-style comedy with a stellar cast and hilarious scenes such as the unparalleled lyrical reaction of the corpulent Mrs. Castellari to the rubbing phenomenon.

In short, the marvelous technological intuition of the vibrator to finally close the alleged diagnosis of hysteria in the 1952 drawer.

The first vibration of a hoped-for feminine cultural revolution into whose hat to make the little Emily-style bunnies enter and the big Charlotte-sized Amazons come out.

IMPERDIBLE

26-Jun-2023 by Beatrice