The Eudora Case

14 Brandon Kershner The Eudora Case B&W, 85 min. Welty, at 29 still unsure of her powers, meets the dying Freud by chance in London. She fails to recognize him, and for reasons that remain obscure he fails to enlighten her. His jaw is half gone, he is now deep in Moses and Monotheism. "I'm from Jackson," she announces in a critical early scene set in Regents Park. "I write stories." "I too write," mutters Freud almost incomprehensibly, "and for years I gave practiced psychoanalysis." Welty is inclined to believe him—he has a certain bitter charisma, an air of authority and victimhood. Montage ofa liner crossing,fade to a room near Columbia University. On reflection, she decides the old man was fantasizing, perhaps projecting. His vague meanderings about one Princess Marie Bonaparte surely should have warned her. Welty's trim curls in silhouette, her hand spotlighted on clean, lined paper. She has begun her greatest story, "Why I live in Vienna." The old Austrian will be the unreliable narrator. Perhaps she will change the setting. Jump-cut to Berlin, the Kristallnacht. Fade to Freud, thefinal injections ofmorphine. Credits. ...