Variety Ronnie Sheib An Abject Films production. Produced by Christopher Trent, Anne Feinsilber. Co-producer, Kevin Lombard. Directed by Julian P. Hobbs. Screenplay by Hobbs, Dominic Taylor, Fred Tietz, Allen Weiss. With: Jefferson Mays, Robert Cucuzza, Joe Coleman, Lara Milian. Julian Hobbs, in his helming debut "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness," fictionalizes a seminal case in the history of psychoanalysis -- that of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose 1903 account of his own insanity inspired Freud, Jung and Lacan. At a time when documentaries are increasingly tackling the constructs of madness, Hobbs' inspired feature sticks close to real-life texts, retaining Schreber's disconcerting mix of Teutonic clarity and schizophrenic imaginings. Richly layered pic dramatizes a landmark doctor/patient showdown, chronicles a classic case of transgenderism and reveals how aspects of Schreber's story prefigured Nazism. Package could lure cutting-edge arthouse auds. Under Schreber's (Jefferson Mays) voiceover memoirs, a series of stiffly posed, fragmented scenes portray his turn-of-the-century marriage, his appointment as high judge, the subsequent slow infiltration of madness and his incarceration in an insane asylum. Unlike Freud, who saw in Schreber's account a case history of homosexual repression and paranoia, Hobbs offers no single-stranded interpretation. Rather the multiple failed pregnancies of Schreber's wife (Lara Milian), Schreber's relationship to his father (Joe Coleman), and the dubious care given him by Dr. Emil Flechsig (Bob Cucuzza) are interwoven into the fabric of his delusions. Recurring images of his wildly weeping wife and an overhead shot of Schreber lying beside her in bed writhing in imagined feminine orgasm mark the onset of his breakdown. Later, when he starts to fashion a dress out of his strait jacket and imagines he has been chosen by God to give birth to a new race of men, the earlier ambivalent visions of procreation and female sexuality resonate. At the heart of the film is the escalating hostility between doctor and patient. Part of Schreber's cosmic paranoia clearly derives from his punitive treatment at the hands of Dr. Flechsig, who is seen to be as threatened by Schreber's sanity as he is by his insanity. Flechsig's desire to eradicate all deviation from the norm -- including deviations from the norm of insanity -- mirror Schreber's father's fanatical crusade to rid the body of all impurity, and echo in Schreber's musings on the "vile course" Germany is on. Thesping is brilliant throughout. May, in a variation of his Tony-winning role in "I Am My Own Wife," makes Schreber's lightning switches from coherence to screams and shouts as believably disconcerting as his sudden assumptions of seductive femininity. Cucuzza's Flechsig channels Dr. Caligari without sacrificing contemporary technique. Using sepia tones to achieve the look of daguerreotypes, with outdoor interludes in brilliant whites and acid greens, Hobbs' depictions of Schreber's hallucinations never assume cliched psychedelia. Rather they appear in patterns suggestive of an order more terrifying than mere chaos. Tech credits are superlative. Kevin Lombard's Super16 lensing imposes gravitas to Schreber's wildest head-trips, while Donald DiNocola's sound design transports Schreber's desperate search for harmony into audio spheres. Camera (color/sepia-toned B&W, Super 16mm), Kevin Lombard; editor, Joey Grossfeld; music, Donald DiNicola; production designer, Tietz; costume designer, Lee Harper; sound, DiNicola. Reviewed at NewFest Film Festival, New York, June 3, 2006. Running time: 78 MIN.

New York Times Memories of My Nervous Illness (2006) A Life of Torment, Delusion and Decline By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS Published: December 15, 2006 Following his Tony Award-winning turn as a German transvestite in “I Am My Own Wife,” the American actor Jefferson Mays is back in rouge and petticoats for “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” a punctilious account of madness and womb envy. Based on the journal of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (Mr. Mays) during his turn-of-the-century stay in a Leipzig sanatorium, the movie documents his clamorous decline in scenes of disturbing potency. Claiming to converse with God by means of an ecstatic “nerve language,” Schreber is prescribed opium and tepid baths by the asylum’s egotistical shrink, Dr. Emil Flechsig (Robert Cucuzza). These ministrations do nothing to discourage the patient’s feminine side, and soon he’s turning a straitjacket into a makeshift corset and a bedsheet into a strapless gown. The result is an ensemble few debutantes could pull off, but Mr. Mays looks absolutely fabulous. Bracketed by a strong courtroom scene of Schreber arguing eloquently for his release, “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness” is an account of a bizarre case that contributed to the theories of, among others, Freud and Lacan. Julian P. Hobbs directs by getting out of the way of his star’s soulful eyes and considerable talent, allowing Mr. Mays to feed on the tension between the rationality of his character’s courtroom argument and the utter lunacy of his beliefs. “I communicate with souls,” Schreber says, a line that says as much about Mr. Mays’s performance as his character’s grand delusion.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is a biopic that is inherently risky -- it centers on a figure that, for all intents and purposes, no one has ever heard of. What it lacks in familiarity, though, it makes up for with the voyeuristic thrill from a very lucid depiction of madness. In 1903 Germany, the erudite and well-spoken Daniel Paul Schreber (Jefferson Mays), a former judge, pleads his came to be released from an insane asylum. His calm and detailed account of his own mental illness, offering the film both its structure and its voice over narration, is taken from Schreber's real-life diaries. The diaries began as an effort by a dedicated doctor, Flechsig (Robert Cucuzza) to quell Schreber's descent into insanity, but Schreber proves an adversary every bit as intelligent and stubborn as Flechsig's best efforts in treatment. Though Schreber was committed initially for erratic behavior and "nerves," despite the finest in psychiatric care of the era -- including sedatives, fresh air, and the curative powers of deep knee bends -- Schreber's mental state spirals out of Flechsig's most rigid control. He's got madness of the literally howling-at-the-moon variety, along with hallucinations, paranoia, and grandiose opinions of himself, and he busies himself with endless sketches and ravings in the pages of his journal. He has a philosophical sort of madness, full of thoughts on the nature of God's communication with his body and his role in the universe. Eventually, even Schreber's gender identity comes into question, as he begins to feel himself transform into a woman. On the one hand, this is preposterous, and little more than the ravings of a man with come clear, and serious, mental issues. On the other, though Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is so very eloquent and matter of fact that it is difficult to dismiss Schreber out of hand. His nearly incoherent ramblings can get indulgent and lengthy, especially as they all are heading to the same place, but they are also often illuminating as to the warped perceptions and twisted logic that can comprise an intelligent, ill brain. Told using visuals as fuzzy and color-saturates as a ye olde tyme photograph, the whole of Memoirs is dream-like and otherworldly. It not only puts a context to the treatment and understanding of Schreber's mental illness, but it makes his hallucinations seem almost interchangeable fairly tale of his reality. It does not, however, entirely justify the rather theatrical staging and performances of the film, but it does a lot to absorb them in the sumptuous surroundings. Mays does a lot towards making Schreber a complete character, full of conviction and belief in the new world order he concocts during his time in the asylum, and his constant war with Cucuzza's obsessive doctor lend the film its heft. It is fortunate that both performances are strong, because there are really only two other actors of note in the entire feature -- Lara Milian as Schreber's wife, who is stilted and mannered, and Joe Coleman, who appears in hallucinations as Schreber's father, whose entire role is to pontificate in long, overblown monologues behind a gauzy filter -- and neither do the film much credit. Memoirs is indulgent and erudite in a way that only an art film can be, and it manages to simultaneously be overly long and end too soon, before we get to know what becomes of Schreber after he concludes his writing. But much of its fanciful missteps fall away when it is placed in the context of a true memoir, and one that chronicles the workings of a madman from the inside out.

Odd but never dull, Julian P. Hobb's impressionistic adaptation of Daniel Paul Schreber's baroque 1903 account of his mental disorder rests largely on a riveting performance by Tony Award-winning actor Jefferson Mays. The son of the noted 18th-century child-rearing expert Moritz Schreber (played by controversial artist Joe Coleman) who stressed posture, severe physical discipline and hygiene over all else, Daniel Paul Schreber (Mays), now a judge, suffers a serious psychotic break not long after beeing appointed Senatsprasident of Dresden's superior state court. Unable to sleep and convinced he's read his own newspaper obituary, Schreber travels with his wife, Sabine (Lara Milian), to the University of Leipzig's psychiatric clinic, where he's placed under the care of Dr. Emil Flechsig (Robert Cucuzza), a stern father figure around whom Schreber constructs a bizarre and exceedingly complex paranoid delusion. Schreber postulates the existence of a "nerve language," which God, Dr. Flechsig and others use to communicate with him telepathically, and fears that Flechsig might even be interfering with God's divine communications, or "rays," and committing "soul murder" — prolonging the existence of his own soul by stealing Schreber's. Initially fascinated, Dr. Flechsig prescribes tepid baths and opium, encouraging Schreber to record his fevered thoughts in a journal. But Schreber's outbursts and strange accusations soon lead the frustrated doctor to harsher measures: increased potassium bromide, brutal force feeding, straitjacketing and confinement in a dank, filthy cell. As Schreber continues to scribble and draw in his journal — a blasphemous, even pornographic work that shocks and disgusts Dr. Flechsig but which Schreber believes contains a new religious truth — he comes to believe that his spiritual contest with the good doctor is destroying the human race. Schreber's delusions take a still stranger turn when he feels he's becoming "unmanned" — turned into a woman — so he can be fertilized by God and repopulate the earth. Hobbs, who owes a strong stylistic debt to Carl Theodor Dryer, takes much of Schreber's fractured dialogue directly from his published work, a harrowing, sometimes poetic and endlessly fascinating read. While placing more emphasis on the effects of Dr. Flechsig's sadistic treatment, Hobbs' perspective echoes those already posed by Freud and, more recently, Morton Schatzman, who concluded that Schreber's madness was directly tied to the extreme disciplinary regime recommended by his mentally ill father. Hobbs, however, brings home the important idea that regardless of how outlandishly unreal his thoughts were, Schreber's suffering was real and he was able to translate it into an enduring work of art. Whether frozen in a state of divine ecstasy, screaming in strange tongues or writhing in "voluptuous excess," Hayes' remarkable portrayal calls forth the madman from the text and, eventually, the human being from the madman.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is made in the essential spirit of independent cinema: take risks to present an eye-opening new experience, that is both challenging and rewarding. Filmed in Hudson, New York in an abandoned factory, this period piece is inspired by the chamber dramas of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer. Local Hudson residences teamed up with a New York City-based cast and crew, by providing actors, antiques and local craft skills. Schreber's journal is hand drawn by Jefferson Mays, the nerve rays sound-scape samples galactic noise from NASA space probes, and the film's score blends Schubert with the other-worldly dissonance of German sound composer Tomas Kroner and New York avant-garde composer Julie Wolf.