Repulsion
Roman Polanski’s Repulsion is disturbing, challenging, weird, and intense. It’s also awesome. The 1965 flick stars Catherine Deneuve and is actually Polanski’s first English language feature. It was shot in Britain and is considered to be the first of the filmmaker’s so-called “apartment trilogy.” The other two are Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant.
Repulsion is a film that descends. It always drills downward into the psyche of its character. There are no real twists or turns or surprises, at least in the classic sense, and we simply watch as Deneuve’s character becomes stranger and stranger. There’s something wrong with her, but we aren’t sure what. Her silence and her blank stares may remind us of someone we know.
Deneuve is Carole, a young manicurist living in London. She lives with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). Carole is awkward and shy, but not to the point of being overly noticeable about it. She works well and most people only consider her to be a bit of an introvert. Nothing special. Carole does appear to have problems with males, however, and continually brushes off a hopeful suitor named Colin (John Fraser).
When Carole’s sister takes off to Italy with her married boyfriend (Ian Hendry), Carole gets the apartment to herself. It gradually becomes her prison and she is distracted by the volume of visions in her head. We still aren’t sure what’s wrong, but things keep getting worse for Carole and soon the violent projections of her psyche begin to emerge in striking fashion.
Deneuve plays Carole beautifully. She is an elegant girl, never particularly creepy or scary in her expressions. Everything she does carries a kind of blankness, as though she’s the sort of girl who’s not all there but still very sane. Deneuve offers a character lost in her thoughts, but she still holds a steady job and even seems to have a friend at work. She also has the sympathy of her boss and seems the sort of girl one would want to take care of.
Yet underneath it, something haunts Carole. There are clues, such as the last shot of the picture, but Polanski never explains it fully. Something has driven her to the point where she is repulsed by sexual energy. As she lies awake at night trying to drown out the coital noises of her sister and her lover, Carole’s desperation begins to show.
It is clear that Repulsion, with its wiry energy and dark psychological secrets, has influenced many of today’s better filmmakers. Darren Aronofsky certainly saw it. The flick is every bit a lean animal, one that descends into madness and gnaws away at the rotten rabbit in the fridge. It’s disturbing and yet oddly welcoming, functioning like a cool, distant blonde might under the right light.
There are plenty of compelling sequences to Repulsion and it really is a flick to check out more than once because of the hidden and not-so-hidden imagery. From the hallway of hands that grimly bears resemblance to Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast to the eyeball credit sequence that haunts from the outset, Polanski’s movie is a masterpiece of psychological horror. Pay special attention to the cracks, too, as they deepen and become stronger the more Carole descends into inescapable psychosis
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