If you know the name, you’ll know the film. Semmelweis tells the story of the 19th-century doctor who introduced hand-washing to labour wards in Vienna and at a stroke reduced the incidence of puerperal (aka childbed) fever, a killer of new mothers.
Opening shot: a pregnant woman going into labour on the Austrian capital’s streets screaming blue murder when the police try to hustle her into the “death factory”, as she calls the maternity hospital.
We’ve been plunged straight into the meat of the movie. Why is she so reluctant to go? What is regularly killing new mothers in this venerable institution, and why, we soon learn, does the midwife clinic across the city – staffed entirely by women – not have anywhere near as many fatalities?
Milós H Vecsei plays Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor – righteous, handsome, stern but compassionate, vocal but brusque – who will get to the bottom of this puzzle, accompanied by a nurse, Emma Hoffman (Katica Nagy). They’re a pair of outsiders, he on account of his nationality, she because she had an affair with the professor (or so the rumour goes) who ran the self-same midwife clinic.
If you know the name, you’ll also have a good idea of what sort of film this is going to be. On one side the intransigent establishment more interested in saving face than saving lives and refusing to look at cold, hard evidence. On the other the lone crusaders out on a limb until metaphorically ordered to turn in their gun and badge by the chief (aka Professor Klein, played with lots of nuance by László Gálffi). At which point the detective duo go it alone.
You might also have seen one or more of many earlier films on the subject. Fred Zinnemann’s The Mothers Might Love, a Hungarian film also called Semmelweis from 1940, the French Docteur Semmelweis from 1994. To name a few.
Like other films about heroes of science – Marie Curie or Albert Einstein for example – there’s a certain, stately way of doing this sort of thing. And that’s the way director Lajos Koltai plays it, telling the story straight, keeping the message simple – good guys v bad guys – and making things look nice. Koltai is best known as a cinematographer, having worked with the likes of Giuseppe Tornatore and István Szabó, but resists the urge to make his film too pretty. Semmelweis is well lit without being artsy, handsomely mounted but not picture-postcard cute.
In case sepsis isn’t you’re number one go-to, there’s also a classic boy-meets-girl romance as back-up, the handsome radical doctor and the big-eyed smart nurse. Vecsei and Nagy are particularly good at this side of things, and since the scientific content isn’t that detailed – there’s no real discussion, for instance, of the miasmatic theory (bad air, basically) that kept the old guard so welded to their positions – the romantic half of the equation needs to work. And it does.
One little moment. Detective style, Semmelweis and Hoffman break into the house of Jakob (Ferenc Elek), a hedonistic doctor friend who has unfortunately sustained a cut to his hand during an autopsy. As Ignaz gives Emma a hand up through Jakob’s ground floor window, he takes a lungful of her odour as her skirts pass his face. He’s transported. You can’t imagine Hollywood doing that.
Jakob also turns out to be the key that unlocks the scientific puzzle. The women are dying, as we now all know, because they are being infected by micro-organisms from the corpses the doctors dissect as part of their research. Midwives don’t conduct autopsies, hence the different mortality rates at the midwife clinic. The doctors, meanwhile, also don’t wash their hands properly, if at all, and complain constantly of them smelling of cadaverine (rotting corpse).
What Doctor Semmelweis is circling around is germ theory – disease is spread by micro-organisms not “bad air” – which Louis Pasteur would confirm in France later in the century. Koltai and writer Balázs Maruszki tells us this in a written afterword, which in a way sums up the entire film. The ostensible offer is the dry scientific biopic but in reality what Koltai and Maruszki are giving us is a smart detective-thriller romance. There’s a reason why this was the highest grossing home-grown picture in Hungary this decade.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
