A Double Bill of Female Insanity

Repulsion (1965) and Possession (1981)

Film #1: Repulsion (1965)

Roman Polanski’s low-budget masterpiece is a film about perception. It is about how the workings of our interior mind can be projected onto the spaces of our exterior world. In this case, the apartment of Catherine Deneuve’s fantastically portrayed social automaton Carol. The film opens with a shot of our central character’s eye, before drawing out to introduce the character herself. Carol’s perception is paramount to this film, and henceforth, we see the events of the film through her eyes. Critic, Peter Bradshaw believes:

“There can’t be many other films which so plausibly show an entire, warped world created from a single point of view.”

With eyes as a central motif of the film, it isn’t long before the film collapses into a surreal Dali-esque nightmare. Think the slicing of an eyeball in Dali’s collaboration with filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, or the kaleidoscope of eyes in the dream sequence Dali designed for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. For Dali, dreams and the eye are intrinsically linked. The same can be said for Roman Polanski.

Polanski meticulously constructs his celluloid world. The visual effects that produce the flyblown chaos of the flat reflects the chaos in Carol’s mind as she gradually loses her grip on reality. The claustrophobic London apartment is Polanski’s house of horror, his gothic castle, his cabin in the woods. The walls close in around Carol. They begin to crumble and crack, even reaching out to grab her, and turn to Play-Doh in her hands. For a social outcast like Carol, closed off from the outside world, the apartment eventually becomes her whole reality. She projects her inner space onto the outer space, and the apartment begins to reflect the disintegration of her own mind.

The sound design if of equal importance. The beating of a heart, the moaning of a woman reaching climax, the ringing of a bell — all repetitive sounds that are the texture of Carol’s perception. The film is very sensual in both its visual and sonic imagery. Polanski even begins to muddle and confuse the two forms. He chooses to shoot the rape scenes without the sounds of the act itself. Rather we hear the ticking of a clock. Carol clawing at the bedsheets, her wide eyes, and her silent, screaming mouth are the visual manifestation of her crying out.

Polanski also dresses the film with pertinent details that further exemplify Carol’s progressing madness, that grows deeper over the aching passage of time. Potatoes sprout in the kitchen and rabbit meat rots on a plate and eventually collects flies. As Carol’s sanity decays, so do the little things that make up her life. Carol is segregated from the outside world — she cuts the telephone wire in one scene — but time does not stand still. One is reminded of later films such as Rosemary’s Baby. Paranoid women holed up in large apartments is what Polanski does best and he has often been described as voyeur rather than a filmmaker. Carol’s eyes and Polanski’s camera lens seem to become interchangeable. Therefore, Repulsion, a film that gives form to its conceptual ideas about the fragility of the human mind through inventive and imaginative cinematic effects, is not only Polanski’s voyeuristic window into the private apartment of a secluded woman, but a voyeuristic tour through the workings of a person’s mind.

Film #2: Possession (1981)

Here is another film that bridges the gap between the supernatural and the real. It is a film that attempts to defy explanation, and its meanings can be debated forever. Loaded with intense imagery, the film gets so far under your skin that even a young Sam Neill maniacally rotating a chair drives you briefly insane. But it is Isabelle Adjani’s performance as Anna (and of course her doppelgänger Helen) that steals the show. The role earned Adjani ‘The Best Actress’ award at the Cannes Film Festival yet she claims she is never going to play a similar role again. Director Żuławski even claims that Adjani would never watch back the dailies despite his insistence. Perhaps even she was scared of the darkness that they had created in the character.

Go to the FAQ for Possession on IMDb and you will find that there is only one: “What did I just see?” It explains that the film is allegory for a divorce. Like Polanski’s Repulsion, the milk, blood, and slime that Anna writhes around in, in easily the most famous scene in the film and a very iconic scene in all of cinema, is Żuławski’s attempt to give material form to the conceptual ideas that the film hopes to convey. However, rather than being about a societal outsider’s descent into madness, we see a wife’s descent, and the effects that it has on her husband, and her marriage as a whole.

Żuławski’s own messy divorce served as inspiration for the film. The divorce almost drove him to suicide, and the same can be said of the film’s central characters. Anna’s mysterious doppelgänger, Helen, claims she comes

“from a place where evil seems easier to pinpoint because you can see it in the flesh”.

Helen, and Mark’s doppelgängers are Żuławski’s fleshy formation of a divorce. Anna’s and Mark’s desires have physically manifested themselves as replications of the real and they are material representations of the idealised wife and husband.

The film’s imagery is both intense and excessive. Anna moves into a dilapidated apartment that harbours a blood- and sex-starved monster, whom at one point she makes love to, tentacles and all. Such imagery, as well as the film’s performances, often seem at risk of descending into hyperbole, but Żuławski finds the perfect blend between the mundanity of Berlin life and supernatural horror so that the film does alienate itself. Through its horror, the film portrays the emotional excess of divorce, and the apparent evil that can arise from a marriage in process of falling apart. Żuławski is clearly a passionate explorer of what’s most self-destructive about us. Despite its grotesque depictions of the body, and its unsparing portrayal of insanity manifested in frenzied wailing and galvanised body-jerks, it is a film that uses surreal and puzzling imagery, that at times seems impossible to truly comprehend, in a hope to explore the harsh reality of something that everyone knows: family.