Films: 1960s
(1965) Repulsion
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Repulsion
Director: Roman Polanski
Release: 1965
It is bell, book and candle for Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanksi's 1965 psychological horror film "Repulsion."
The religious objects of exorcism come not necessarily in that order, but come they do as Deneuve's character, Carole Ledoux, attempts to cleanse herself of dark and violent sexuality while psychically paralyzed inside her sister's London apartment.
Carole lives with sister Helene (Yvonne Furneaux). She works at the hair salon of Madame Denise (Valerie Taylor) and struggles to avoid the romantic advances of would-be boyfriend Michael (Ian Henry).
Simultaneously, she is disgusted and scared of Colin (John Fraser), a married man with whom Helene is having an affair. When Helene and Colin depart for an Italian vacation, Carole rapidly and devastatingly withdraws from reality, until the apartment becomes a nest of rape and death.
What it is that plagues Carole's sanity is kept ambiguous and shifting, a curtained room much like the parlor in which she sews while idiotic piano scales play through the wall. Carole has a history of some sort of sexual trauma that has irrevocably damaged her ability interact with the world, with males in particular.
That damage may have something to do with family. Polanski focuses several times (and it is the final shot of "Repulsion") on a photograph of Carole as a young girl, somewhere in Brussels with mother, father, and presumably aunt and uncle. She looks far away and troubled in the picture, while the others beam at their photographer.
Primarily, though, Polanski draws our attention to Carole's untenable present.
"Repulsion" begins with an excruciating close-up of her right eye. The proximity is discomforting, the biological details of the gelatinous orb off-putting. The eye is liquid. It is moist. It moves nervously.
This homage to Luis Bunuel's "Un chien andalou," with its opening razor-across-the-oculus scene, plays out in other ways as that very instrument enters the plot. Surrealism is Polanski's well in "Repulsion," and he goes to it often as hands reach from walls and cracks rupture the structure of Carole's apartment. A plate of rotting rabbit describes Carole's relationship with her flesh, potatoes gone obscenely to root provide a visual key to her increasingly destructive imagination.
"Repulsion" is as much a cousin to its surrealist predecessors as it is a gentle nudge in new directions for mid-20th Century horror film.
The world, for Carole, is a series of fearful ephemeral projections. Her interior is broadcast from the start, as she holds the limp hand of an aging woman receiving a facial at the spa. Carole is fresh and young, but she is grips the listless hand of asexual post-fertile femininity - a virtual mummy. When she walks the street, she passes sexually voracious construction workers who lurk in black-mouthed tents erected over manhole covers - they are literal gatekeepers of the underworld.
Across from Carole's window at home, white-robed nuns play catch and giggle. The convent bell rings incessantly. She is constantly aware of, and separate from, the nuns' pristine and pious existence. Whatever it if that has stained Carole drives her obsession with the spotless white habits, but she cannot simply walk out to the life she watches. She must eventually draw closed the curtains onto that world (but she cannot escape the sound of the bells).
Once she is secluded and alone in the apartment, her trials manifest in repetitive, concrete and terrifying ways.
There are three intrusions from the real world and three intrusions generated by her mind. During these invasions, Carole's only link to reality is a telephone. Sometimes Michael is on the other end, sometimes it is the landlord, and sometimes there is only menacing silence on the line. Ultimately, she yanks the cord from the wall when Colin's spurned wife calls.
"You filthy bitch," she growls at Carole, confirming her perceived condemnation.
Intrusion one is that of Colin. Carole complains to Helene that Colin is in the apartment every night. It is true. Carole lies awake night and morning, listening to her sister's orgasms through the wall. Colin violates (literally and figuratively) of Carole's family structure. Not only does he possess Helene physically, he makes lewd commentary on Carole in the apartment, and then fulfills Carole's worst-case scenario by stealing Helene away to Europe. Carole is left without the maternal figure of Helene, and Madame Denise's momentary replacement in that role lasts only as long as Carole is able to work at the salon. When she slices one of the older ladies with cuticle clippers, the surrogate mother relationship ends.
Intrusion two is that of Michael, who tests Carole's spiritual faith on a daily basis. When he finally comes calling, desperate for information about his vanished quarry, he breaks down the apartment door and Carole defends her chaste hideaway by beating him to death with a candlestick. She cleans the blood from the front door with a book.
Cleaning is another repeated and inherently religious effort by Carole in "Repulsion." She spends time at sinks. She washes her feet, splashes her face; at time she leans in and drinks from the faucet.
If, in Polanski's world, water is Carole's connection with God (a sort of spiritual amniotic fluid within the membrane of the apartment), then a key scene is when she fills the bathtub and it overflows. Having lost control of her relationship with God, never again does Carole enjoy purifying or sustaining moments with the liquid. Instead, it becomes the mess into which she dissolves. In the final act of attempted contact, she dumps Michael's lifeless body into the filled bathtub. The water blackens as blood pours from the corpse, but Carole' attempted offering is ignored.
The third and final intrusion is that of the landlord (Patrick Wymark), vehemently pursuing the Ledoux's tardy rent. He is the State come to collect (from) Carole, and he is also Satan, harvesting souls.
"The heat is getting to you?" he asks her, as he notices her exposed legs and begins a direct and brutal "seduction" during which he offers to forgive rent in exchange for her body - a long-term bargain. When he turns his back, Carole hacks him to death with Colin's razor.
Coupled with these three intrusions are three rape fantasies, over the course of which Carole transforms. In the first, a man in a dirty leather jacket breaks into her room and brutalizes her from behind in her bed. She awakes on the floor, under the rotting boiled rabbit.
In the second, the rapist wears a dirty white T-shirt and takes her in the missionary position. She awakes unclothed on the floor in the threshold between room and hallway.
In the third instance, she has prepared herself - put on lipstick - and she smiles. Polanski's camera tracks in on her until her face fills the frame and the audience is itself almost breathless with the anticipated contact and then the rapist is in bed next to her and she flails about, knocking a lamp into the lens and whiting-out the final attack.
Polanski has thus driven a subtle key point home: that there is indeed a fourth "invasion," that of camera in the apartment.
The camera probes Carole's every detail and is privy to her private existence when she shuts the rest of the world away. The destruction of her mind is as much the effect of the camera and watching audience floating next to her, day in and day out, as it is the effect of the sexual monsters that lurk in her apartment. Other characters, particularly at the spa, note that she turns away and faces the corner. Is she sleeping? She is not, but in fact is taking advantage of her only possible solitude, when the camera is concerned with other characters.
The religious exorcism of bell, book, and candle fails because Carole corrupts the ingredients and their purpose. In "Repulsion," the only way Carole can escape the all seeing eye - the Other of the camera (one of at least two, then, in the film) - is to blind it with the lamp and then hide under her sister's bed. It takes a fresh crop of characters breaking into the scene to discover her, and she is taken away from the horror-show apartment.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Repulsion, 1965
The third and final intrusion is that of the landlord (Patrick Wymark), vehemently pursuing the Ledoux's tardy rent. He is the State come to collect (from) Carole, and he is also Satan, harvesting souls.
