Repulsion

Well, that was a mistake. I had no idea Repulsion was a horror film. Incidentally, one that takes place almost entirely inside an apartment. It's actually the first film in a series of Polanski films dubbed, "The Apartment Trilogy." Nothing like a good ole solitary descent into insanity to lift the spirits. Fuck. Everything about the movie was unsettling; the phantasmagoric floating of the camera as it slowly zooms or pulls away; the vertiginous warping of perspective as Catherine Deneuve's character, Carol, loses more and more of her mind to frightful dreams of home intrusion and rape; the apartment's disorienting stretching of dimensions and the way it repeatedly unseams itself. Then there are the camera angles. Always appearing too short, or too tall, the camera stalks Deneuve in a way that is deliciously voyeuristic. Shots smother her. The cinematography feels close and confined, almost claustrophobic. Deneuve's unaffected, stolid eyes and docile facial expressions belie an impressive richness of emotional depth, helplessness and terror. The sustained stillness of her stare, over the course of the film, has the affect on the viewer of steadily increasing agitation. Her alluring looks and her phlegmatic disassociation from the happenings around her make her curiously charming.

A clever use of sound, always shrill and ringing and cyclical, helps propel the film into looping vignettes of fear and lunacy. A machine-gun drum and some fierce flashes of a blade lay waste to an attempted sexual assault. Later, the ticking of a clock is the only sound we hear at the first of several rape sequences. It replaces even the sound of her screams. During a different sequence, the quick ringing of church-bells amplify the discord onscreen as an intruder tries to force himself on Deneuve. Ringing phones, doorbells and a cacophony of other jarring, repetitive sounds create a mechanical milieu of clockwork madness. The only scenes with overlaid music (and there are only two) are those where Deneuve's character is walking through town, being ogled and verbally harassed by men as upbeat jazz plays.

The viewer spends a lot of time looking with Carol at inanimate objects; a dresser or a lamp, a chair, peeling wallpaper, a rotting rabbit. At times, Carol mirrors these objects, seeming as lifeless, inert and hollow as a pillowcase. Special attention is paid to cracks in the wall, on the sidewalk, or the shape of a hair inside a man's ear. Oddly, all of the cracks bear resemblance to the Y-shape made by a woman standing nude with her legs together. Carol's sleepy, blank eyes always appear to be somewhere other than where she currently is, signifying a profound emotional crisis or a pending psychotic break. The worsening of her condition is such that, as the camera gets closer, the viewer feels ever further away. A beautiful inversion. Visually, there is much emphasis placed on walls, both figuratively and metaphorically. Sometimes they are hard and cracked, other times, as soft and impressionable as clay. The walls, as they show tears, literally tear at her. There is something sexually allegorical about Colin, her suitor, pounding down the door and physically penetrating the space of her apartment. An act, deeply suggestive on its own, ends in a splatter of blood and then the wiping with paper of the blood from the door. It is not surprising that he is placed in the bath after his murder.

Throughout the film, both subtly and overtly, there is a theme of male aggression directed at women. Early on in the film we see male characters grasp at control by grabbing a woman's face or arm or ass and, later, Carol's sister is slapped in the face by her lover as he tries to help her "get a hold of herself." Grubby hands routinely burst through the walls to grope at Deneuve's legs and breasts as she tries to walk down a corridor or leave the bathroom. The multiple rape nightmares/fantasies say all they need to about male sexual aggression. Another recurring motif in the film is the dichotomy between Carol's meekness and her strength; she does only what she wants to, ignores pleas and imperatives, cannot be controlled by any man, and kills the ones who make her feel at all threatened...all while being conspicuously disinterested and quietly aloof. It is a fierce depiction of femininity. Her romantic interest, after he expresses concern for her in the hallway, gets the Clue treatment when she bashes his head in with a candlestick and then disposes of him in the bathtub.

It was a disturbing movie, and now I have to go to bed.