Title: Repulsion
Rating: 4 Stars
This film had been in my queue for quite some time. I no longer remember how it landed there. I was probably reading a book about 1970s cinema auteurs and the troubled Roman Polanski came up. Probably most famous for Chinatown, he did a trilogy of films about the horrors of apartment living. The three were The Tenant, Rosemary's Baby (I wrote about it here), and Repulsion.
When I wrote about Rosemary's Baby, one of my comments was that, despite its reputation as a horror film, at least by modern standards it really wasn't that scary. Disturbing and weird sure, but not scary. Repulsion, also classified as psychological horror, is legitimately creepy and scary. More than just jump scares, it was also disturbing and weird. I was left more unsettled by this film than I was by Rosemary's Baby. This is probably because Rosemary's Baby dealt with devil worship, which doesn't really grab me as a subject that I should be realistically in fear of, while Repulsion was about the downward spiral of mental illness.
Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a very shy manicurist. She can barely make eye contact, let alone engage in a meaningful conversation. Be that as it may, Carol is breathtakingly beautiful. Although she makes no attempt to attract attention, men on the street stare at her as she walks down the street with her head down. Several try to chat her up, much to her disinterest. One man in particular (Colin, played by John Frasier) manages to track her down and convince her to meet him later.
Carol lives with her sister (Helen, played by Yvonne Furneaux). Helen has a married boyfriend (Michael, played by Ian Hendry).
Carol seems to hate all men. She barely talks to Michael. She's infuriated that he stores his toothbrush and razor in her drinking glass in the bathroom. Sharing a wall with Helen's bedroom, she covers her head with a pillow as the two loudly have sex. Somewhere I read that this is the first female orgasm depicted in film (well, aurally since there's nothing to see).
Quick aside...those that make that claim have clearly never watched Hedy Lamar in the film Exstase (youTube clip here). In case, you think silent films are all about pratfalls and sweet innocence, there were some really interesting, experimental, edgy films being made as well. And yes, this is the same Hedy Lamar who co-invented a technique for signal frequency hopping that enabled technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. She's definitely a very interesting woman. Back to the regular scheduled programming...
Her hatred of men extended beyond listening to her sister having sex. She finds Michael's dirty t-shirt on the bathroom floor. She lifts it up and takes a deep sniff. She promptly vomits. After their date, Colin kisses Carol. She immediately runs upstairs to watch her mouth and to vigorously brush her teeth.
It's fair to say that Carol is not in a strong mental state. The triggering event is when Helen and Michael go off on a holiday to Italy, leaving Carol alone in the apartment.
Solitude breaks Carol. She starts seeing cracks in the wall. At night, she hears footprints in her hallway. Hands reach out from the walls to grab her. She sees the flash of a reflection of a man in her bedroom mirror. Eventually her hallucinations manifest into her imagining a man coming to her nightly to violently rape her. Like I said, this is some serious disturbing, scary stuff.
Colin, worried about her, comes to visit her. When she won't let him in, he breaks down the door. Although they've barely exchanged words up to this point, Colin does everything but confess his love for her. Her response to his declaration is to beat him to death with a candlestick. When the landlord comes to collect the rent, he tries to rape her. Carol takes Michael's razor and brutally, repeatedly slashes him.
When Helen and Michael finally come back from Italy, there's two dead men in the apartment and Helen is catatonic. As the film ends, the final scene zooms into a family picture of the sisters' childhood. In the picture are their parents and Helen, all smiling happily. The fourth person, Carol, seems to be staring hatefully at her smiling father. The clear implication is that her father started this cycle of violence by sexually assaulting Carol.
Let's first talk about the big fucking elephant in the room. That would be Roman Polanski. Let's be fair by stating that Polanski's past is full of violence. A French-Polish Jew, his family fled Paris to get away from the Nazis. Unfortunately, they chose Poland. In Krakow, all Jews were rounded up and placed in a ghetto. His pregnant mother was taken away and killed in a gas chamber. His father was taken away to work in a concentration camp. He survived by posing as a Catholic boy, always worried about getting caught by the Nazis.
Of course, there was also the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family.
That does not change the fact that in 1977 Polanski was charged with drugging and raping a thirteen year old girl. Believing that a plea deal was in place, he agreed to plead guilty. Before sentencing, he learned that the judge was going to overturn the plea deal and sentence him to fifty years imprisonment. To avoid that sentence, he fled the US. He has not returned since. Over the years, several other women have come forward to accuse Polanski of raping them while they were underage.
Repulsion was released in 1965. This was before both the rape accusation and the Manson murders. It's, I don't know, psychologically interesting to me that a significant theme of this film was the violence that can eventually manifest when a young girl is sexually assaulted. Was he already raping young girls? Of so, is this film some expression of guilt or realization of the damage that he's causing? How much of his history of sexual violence can be traced back to the brutal nightmare of his childhood?
I don't know, but when I watch a Roman Polanski film now, I find myself asking these questions.
There's a version of this film with a director's commentary. Polanski apparently spends much of the time criticizing the film. He claims that he was too focused on the film's aesthetic. I believe that the term that he used was too "artsy-fartsy". As I watched, I saw what he meant. Sometimes, the film is just a little too clever for its own good. The imagery (such as the cracks appearing as Carol is cracking up) is occasionally a bit too obvious.
Horror films are so graphic and explicit nowadays that I often find myself somewhat immune to the subtler effects of the earlier psychological horror films. Watching Repulsion, I was genuinely scared, disturbed, and haunted.
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