william_miller

Repulsion



You ever get that feeling that you're not quite alone when you're stuck in your house or apartment all day? The sense that there's someone walking around outside, or even worse - has found a way inside that you don't know about. Your personal space is being invaded. You're going to be taken apart systematically by some monstrous evil that's lurking just outside of your vision.

This is the basis of Repulsion, Roman Polanski's second feature, his first English language one. Continuing his use of the black-and-white, dreamlike cinematography that was quickly fading into the background by the mid-60s and was a major hook of his debut Knife In The Water, Repulsion is the story of Carol (Catherine Deneuve at 21), a girl left alone for a week while her sister (Yvonne Furneaux) and her sister's suitor (Ian Hendry) travel to Italy for a holiday. Carol works in a beauty salon, spending her days listening to old women prattle on about unimportant things, and while seeming to be timid and shy around those who aren't her sister (she simply gives the man of the house odd stares when he talks to her), she simply seems socially awkward.

Well, once her sister and the suitor are gone, it's all downhill for Carol. She's left with a rabbit in the fridge to cook, some potatoes, and enough money to survive on for the week, as well as money to pay off the rent for the month. While you'd think of food as merely an attempt for some scares (look at the Spielberg/Hooper film Poltergeist for that if you really want that), Polanski instead takes the idea down another path - a visual cue into Carol's headspace. As her mental state deteriorates, we watch as the rabbit loses its head and become a rotting corpse on the kitchen counter, while the potatoes grow old and begin to sprout roots, created gnarled images on top of a kitchen table.

While she leaves the food to rot, Carol tries to hold herself together, avoiding the affections of a would-be suitor (John Fraser), continuing her work, day in and day out. It doesn't take long for her to be affected by her own internal problems, though, now that she's left alone with them - after a few mistakes, she's told to go home and rest for a few days before coming back.

The days go by. And every day, the walls seem a little darker, the corners a little sharper, the view of the world a little more warped. She's frightened of the walls - they split and crack, loud and rough and sudden. She wanders around the apartment in a nightgown, but never sleeps - rather, passes out as she imagines a silent rape happening every night. She awakens, usually off the bed, in a heap, her hair shaken into bizarre shapes from tossing and turning all night. And she continues on, not eating, avoiding the walls, leaving the food to rot.

Fraser's suitor character tracks her down. So she kills him. Polanski takes a very innocent image - Deneuve at 21 was nothing more than a bright eyed blonde, both sleek and buxom, reminding you more of a scared kitten than a lunatic - and warps it quite clearly at this point, as she beats him to death and throws his body into a bathtub, filled with water from a bath she never took.

Up to this point, you're suspecting that Carol is a harmless victim of her own psychosis. But the moment she brings a candlestick down on her suitor, as he attempts to express his feelings for her, the movie takes a sudden sharp turn. Suddenly, you really don't know where it's going to go. She tries to slip down the halls, but hands reach out from the walls and grab at her hair, her breast, her arms, holding her down. You wonder exactly how far gone this woman is.

All the while, the landlord wants his rent money. Carol eventually cuts the cord to the apartment's only phone. She holes herself up in her room, pushes her dressers in front of the doors - but as she sits, in the dark, the shadows getting darker and blacker, the doors begin to shake and push open.

The way sound disappears during what could be the darkest moments in the movie - which is, essentially, when Carol climbs into her bed and constantly relives a specific moment of sexual abuse - is maybe one of the most brilliant parts of the film. You know it's coming, but the character has no release, and thus, the audience doesn't, either. Instead, you're forced to watch Carol's hopeless thrashing until, after two or three of these occurrences, she simply puts on lipstick and waits for the moment to come. And when it does this last time, there's an echo of a scream, played over and over as her lipstick streaks the pillow and she pulls a lamp over on it's side. The release isn't really a release at all, but a further push into the fundamentally broken parts of her brain.

The landlord comes, wants his money. Carol gives him the money. But he stays around, for reasons that aren't particularly official. Noticing she's alone, he cleans up her kitchen, and makes suggestive moves towards her.

Her reaction? To stab him (to penetrate him, when you consider it), first once in the neck, and then several times in the chest. If anything, this would be a release for Carol. In any other movie, this would be normally what pulls her out of this disturbing funk that she's dived into.

She doesn't. The sister and her suitor come home to find the apartment tossed - the walls still all together - and Carol, passed out from lack of eating and sleep, underneath a bed. They find the bodies of the men she's murdered. Her sister's suitor carries Carol out of the apartment as the rest of the tenants watch on.

And in these final moments, we get a look into what could possibly have caused Carol to turn into this. It's perhaps the most frightening moment in the movie, quite frankly, because the look that we see her give seems so genuine and filled with both fear and impotent rage. It tells us so much without even hinting at the brutality of what happened. He casts a chain-link shadow over it, as well, suggesting the pent-up nature of all of this. It's all so brilliant, it's a little hard to comprehend.

It's funny; I only started getting into Polanski thanks to the documentary (Wanted & Desired) on his court case in the mid-70s. Rosemary's Baby? Hadn't seen it. I'd only caught part of The Fearless Vampire Killers. Chinatown? Nope. The Pianist had been the only Polanski film I'd sat through. I knew little about him besides the obvious (he raped a girl, left the country, can't come back).

Little did I know that he's pretty much a filmmaking genius and was pretty well screwed over by a judge for his court case, more than anything else.

I had started writing an idea I had about a young woman left alone in her house, succumbing to internal torments concerning trauma in her past, maybe a month or so before I actually saw Repulsion in what would be accurately titled a "film orgy". I found myself a little more depressed after finishing Repulsion.

There's something about someone having done an idea you have 40 years ago, and doing it so well. Nobody's really gone back to it, although there is an argument for something like Panic Room or π has elements of Repulsion - although Panic Room owes a lot more to Wait Until Dark.

In a way, though, as I work through a rewrite of my story, I think I've pulled more inspiration from Repulsion than anything else. I mean, nobody's done something quite like it in 40 years. That's a hell of a long time. And while there's a superficial element - abused women dealing with their problems - the two stories differ in almost every other way (my character's sister is constantly there and in fact part of the work is about her dealing with a sister developing this madness, the trauma is more concentrated on emotional and physical abuse from a bad marriage, not childhood sexual abuse).

But the fact that it exists is something I'm thankful for these days. When I hit a roadblock while writing? Pop in Repulsion. Twenty or so minutes in, I figure out something new about it and find myself unlocking things within my own story.

It's amazing how a good, disturbingly frightening, psychological movie can do that sometimes.

It's amazing what a good story can do.