© 2015 by James Clark
Auteur Roman Polanski, a film exponent being one of the most incendiary figures of a regularly dizzy business, is, I think, at his most perverse in carrying out a long-standing sniper vendetta concerning the only first-rate film he ever laid hands upon, namely, Repulsion (1965). Claims like helming a piece of junk (under the auspices of a porn-flick profit centre) to finance weightier fare and committing a spree of jejune technical sins are truly creepy; but they are also a gift in revealing an artist struggling with deep and difficult matters he passionately cares about while being overtaken by the bad news that such aspirations do not rise to cherished hopes of long-term fame and fortune. (In this downdraft Polanski demonstrates the heart of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Second Wind [1966], with its protagonist leaving full-scale rigorous endeavor for losers while he, the aptly named Gu, embarks on maintaining a version of Public Enemy #1, an unwitting instance by the later movie mover while overdosing on the shaky avant-gardism of remarkable but unduly ascetic [thereby unduly popular] Samuel Beckett. [His yappy recanting the subtle glories of Repulsion thereby becomes a close relative to the abject cowardice of Will in Michael Mann’s Manhunter [1986].)
The first chapter of Repulsion gifts the viewer with a rendition of years of intense and solitary disclosure, from out of which to unwind as much a universal as an individual disaster. In a “beauty parlor” we behold not only a paragon of beauty, young actress Catherine Deneuve—still on the crest of her coup in Jacques Demy’s film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)—playing the part of Carol Ledoux (that surname denoting restorative gentleness and possible fragility), but a middle-aged woman laid out on a recliner and with a face loaded down with crusted mud as to bring about the optics of a morgue. Soon we realize she is one of Carol’s regular clients, who makes no bones about complaining that the service could be much better. “Have you fallen asleep? I think you must be in love or something…” True enough, Carol has drifted into some kind of reverie. But shop-talk quips are not about to bring transparency to the goddess’ peculiar situation. The opening credits do their best to get us up to speed about her, especially about her unlikely métier of student of primordial dynamics where what nearly everyone sees is a carefully turned out shop girl (sort of like Genevieve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), with a future almost certainly immersed in more or less domestic bliss. We first see her, in those hard-working credits, as a single eye accompanied by a subdued and relentless marching drum beat. At first her iris is at rest; but as her sighting, graphically flicking off names pertaining to her presence in what is to come, undergoes prolonged lack of resolution, the eye wanders in its orb, blinking impatiently, seeking relief from an impasse the sonic urgency of which touching us all as viewers. Then the camera draws back and we see that she is linked to the living dead thing who eventually goes on to express a means of dealing with her own sense of life being unforthcoming. Proceeding to polish the customer’s nails as usual, Carol is stopped cold by the command to do something different. “I feel like a change… Give me Revlon’s “Fire and Ice.” Our protagonist, not able to find in stock such a rare virtuoso equilibrium—Have we thus been given the objective troubling her during the credits?—comes to the owner of this little land of rejuvenation and explains (especially ringing bells for those of us with a sense of dark irony), “I don’t think there’s any left!” The worldly boss lady soon clears up the crisis in advising, “Put this on [a color less extreme]. She’ll never know the difference…”
Perhaps the most important scene of the film follows directly upon that kooky transaction. Maybe we shouldn’t make such a point of its never having been noticed by commentary through the decades; but even a cursory tour through what people imagine to be going on in Repulsion finds an insistent and completely inappropriate testimony that that saga caused the reporter more shock and aftershock than any of the other reams of massacre they had counted on when “feeling like a change.” Paying homage to Polanski’s craft in creating anxiety leading up to the repulsive pain of Carol’s first of all beating the brains out of her boyfriend with a candle holder (fire and ice in play) and then slashing to ribbons her landlord would have us imagine that auteurship is a type of highly spiced culinary or whiplash-inducing midway-ride production. As to any supplementary provisions the entertainment might include, the safe-bet line is its easily supposed contribution to the amelioration of mental illness. Close attention to the scene about to be considered now could allow one to realize that Carol is not mentally ill at all (intermittent depression aside), showing (near) classic symptoms of psychosis as remarkably stemming from very specific and well illuminated intentional, uncanny, poetic sources as sharply distinct from material, canny, prosaic sources like brain chemistry and brain structure. (Repulsion has nothing in common with films like Still Alice.) Carol’s sister’s boyfriend opines, “She should see a doctor.” That would be an exactly wrong move for someone having placed herself in a predicament only she can brave to delight.
Further to the question of ragingly missing the physical heart of this film, we have a vein of earthiness so deficient as to direct viewer discernment toward the outstanding matter now imminent. A friend of the soon to be dead suitor comes into a bar, joining that Colin, and recounts—in avid raconteur style—a bloody brawl between two women in a bar the night before. The speaker self-servingly cites that he alone tried to break it up, damaging his suit jacket and ruining a shirt; but it is clear he found the incident to be first-rate entertainment, as did a third member of the party. Joining that fan base is Helen, Carol’s sister, who gobbles at “professional” wrestling on TV the way ladies adrift used to polish off boxes of chocolates. Therewith Polanski ups the ante for fun seekers, while at the same time alluding to Carol’s task of embracing the sensual so prominent in our ignored scene-stealer to come. (During her miasma while Helen goes on vacation, our protagonist often plods to the kitchen window to observe the problematic and yet fascinating neighborhood centered upon a convent and its grounds where nuns let off steam. On the window sill a household product named “Vim” functions as a beacon not doing its stuff because Carol is not doing her stuff.)
With the send-off, “She’ll never know the difference,” still in the air, Carol strolls along a South Kensington sidewalk for a lunch appointment with Colin. The author of that bon mot is Madame Denise; and the way Carol’s soft voice handles the name she might as well be saying “Madame Demy.” The vivacious flute motif which accompanies her excursion could register as a shot of something joyous and resilient about the beauty who was so oddly transfixed at the workplace. Her marvellous blonde mane held high by a casually confident pace, and igniting something in the air when seen with a background of tony black tinted glass, shows her as full of high hopes as Genevieve was. (Umbrellas was a vision of wall-to-wall color saturation and sweet operetta melody in its mission of laying before us a fabulous treasure of sensibility being betrayed by decadent softness; Repulsion’s regal gray-scale and peppy cool jazz are also very absorbed with the urgencies of atmosphere and how the wheels can fall off. That less than understanding idea-man sloshing around the sisters’ bailiwick shoots off the lame—but also germane—line, “Don’t make too much Dolce Vita while we’re away!” [on vacation]). Erosion against that power had indeed almost locked down the heroine’s range of motion; but the magical tenor of the streets she animates here shows us that a carriage trade endeavor is quite richly in play. Installed at a restaurant and confronted by a salad, she is hailed through the window by Colin and their little pantomime, perhaps echoing the more self-deprecating protagonists in Antonioni’s Eclipse (1962), does contain some bounce. However, on his being seated opposite her and proposing they move on to something more hearty, she lacks all signs of the previous calm gusto, as if being only too acute about Colin’s representing an eclipse of her reservoir of sunniness. She refuses to join him in an improvised breakaway. “I can’t. I’d be late… [Whisper] I can’t…” She then reneges on a dinner date and rushes away without a word or cordial gesture.
She clearly would “know the difference” between lilting and limping as our palpable reception of her lunch reconnoitre proves. What are we to make of her lassitude so remarkably curtailing those sensuous powers on display? The film goes to great (and not academic) lengths to enlighten us about the intentional pulse of Carol’s plight. From the first second, showing her eye as a centre of consciousness and concentration, a dilemma of choice takes over. The ocular transmission of the names is primarily sensual not cognitive. The instances of the film-project coterie—a hive of commonality and succour—are in a sense ejected by the enlarged body and therewith the subtle and ultra-sensual complexity of the motions here gains a purchase in our outlook. A spotlight of uncanny beauty comes forward, coming to fuller bloom with the camera’s pulling back and revealing Carol’s movie-goddess proportions with a visage bemused and quietly galvanized while a tenuous flute motif makes itself at home. The progress to this point has included an edge of bewilderment and the rather horrific appearance and benightment of the senior as adding weight to Carol’s circuit. But the clichéd quip about her being “in love or something” is as close to supportive cogency as our protagonist is ever apt to receive. For, as we have been invited to contemplate, the center of Carol’s action is indeed a case of being in love (a love that is light-years away from that of Genevieve and her antiquated name; and yet, as the walk to the lunch spot reveals, a kind of Demy skyrocket nonetheless). Another beautician, Brigitte—the name being Polanski’s way of thanking his and our lucky stars that he has the majestically expressive Deneuve on his side—first bitching about having to stay until 7 and then confirming the less than stellar customer in terms of an address to multi-tasking Mlle Ledoux, “Hey, are you asleep?” draws from Carol a bodily and facial attitude of being very distant from her and her tedious distemper.
Nevertheless tedious distemper is what Carol soon dishes out on returning home—biting her nails on the elevator to the flat she shares with her sister. As if to outdo Brigitte in the craft of bitching, she complains in a catty way about Helen’s boyfriend leaving his things around. (“Why does he put his toothbrush in my glass?”) On the other hand, before that (still guarded) hissy fit, modulated, to be sure, as if in homage to the plays of Moliere, she had wandered to the kitchen window and been briefly absorbed with nuns in those grounds of the convent across the way. Fascination comes to her face and we can imagine that several issues come into play. The contrast between her elaborate attentions to her face and body and the indifference to carnality in their repertoire has given her some pause. Hardly an ascetic but also hardly a sexpot, she would behold those medievalists as more, and especially concentrated, militant, opponents. But on the other hand she would see them as hard to define soul mates in their rigorous attention to matters of spirit. Then there is the question of finding stimulating and supportive relations. “Are you still going away?” she asks Helen in turning from the window. “Oh, Darling, don’t start that again,” is where her current tour of resources ends badly. The home-cooked meal of rabbit that trumped Colin’s date that night never happens because Helen’s boyfriend proposes the twosome going to an expensive restaurant. The stresses induced by those latters’ mounting a barely self-perceived declaration that she is not a person of interest comprises for our protagonist a feature of a mounting threat. (The aforementioned vacation, to Italy, being bruisingly an exclusive twosome.) Therewith she begins to fuss about a slight crack on the wall of the generally ill-kempt home, which Helen had never even noticed. “I must get that crack repaired,” Carol proclaims, this out-of-character practical zeal being clearly driven by a sense of having to cling to fortification where her associates won’t do. The interpersonal prospects for her at this stage of the battle she had precipitated had thus been solidified to an axis with Helen (a war-torn name indeed). And with disappointing Helen’s little odyssey underway, Carol has to come to terms with an obvious (too obvious) and deliriously unpleasant reality that no one loves her well enough and no one matters to her (interpersonal love being part of what being in love has come to be to her, however nebulously).
The stages of her descent take full focus during the night out to the restaurant and the fortnight out to Italy. In the first stage she looks at herself in a stainless steel kettle, the distortion becoming a version of the death mask worn by the old lady, and as such a spectre of utter compromise. On the exit by Helen and her admirer the latter opines, “I don’t think Cinderella likes me” [More optics of oppressive emotional violence]. Helen’s view is far more about ensuring they see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, another phenomenon speaking to Carol’s distress. In the darkened flat there is a counter top with memento/knick-knacks and a family photo, now under the sway of a listing bell tower. This homey touch shows Carol as a child with an expression of striking unhappiness. Lying in bed looking at the ceiling, she touches her lips in a bid to bring back that brief lilt along the sidewalk. The lovemaking of the returning lovers—his “I feel like a steak” matching the beauty-seeker’s “I feel like a change”—Helen gasping and groaning, does not help matters for Carol in orbiting along a vein of silence.
Notwithstanding, she stages a rally of sorts the next day. Brigitte is in tears over the man in her life and Carol comforts her, placing an arm around her shoulder and with a quiet, “Don’t be upset…” [That phrasing holding on to a thread of realization that being upset is not the way to go]. Brigitte is called away and as her friend sits trying to assimilate her solitude she beholds a play of sunlight brightening up the seat of another chair in the dingy basement change-room. She runs her hand across the illumination, a motion in the same vein as her touching her lips the night before. On the loose again during the lunch break, she is buffeted by a more driven musical motif, its flute passage failing to elicit blithe adventuring. Carol’s step is controlled but now mundane. At a safety isle she notices the pavement to be cracked by a delicate tree-branch figure. Her shoes and legs are shown being stopped in their tracks. Those limbs and their almost imperceptible flutter become a zone of assurance, even safety, for one who is endangered and in desperate need of a break. Colin finds her there, seated on a bench, lost in thought, (raising comparison with the phoney meditation in Vertigo and undermining another of their luncheon dates) and he calls out, “Are you playing hard to get?” (The cat fight anecdote precedes this struggle to erect a cordon sanitaire.) Then three old blokes go by, a skiffle group, using everyday utensils as percussion instruments to exorcise a nasty grind. In his white convertible sports-car-cum-gyroscope they are parked by her shop and she has lost herself in the disconcerting mission of blitheness that cannot be convincingly manufactured. Eventually he smiles at her and kisses her; and in her discomfort with such importuning she rushes out, pushing the door recklessly into harm’s way and nearly being hit by a passing vehicle. Shredded transport ensues up to the unhomey elevator; she is lying in bed and Helen bids her farewell with, “Honey, what is it? Don’t you feel well? I know you don’t want me to go away… Don’t look so sad. The time will pass very quickly…” (The run-up to this fracture has involved her in bed, the convent bell chiming, her perfect, apparently very functional features highlighted in a dark surround, a clock then ticking and more rutting from roommates looking more short-term by the minute. Her face becomes set in a hard attitude.)
Helen’s “affair”—“It’s my affair”—leaves Carol with, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” marching orders exactly the opposite of what in fact she is now within a death spiral to bring off, namely, sustained, graceful poise in a world painfully ambivalent about composure in its never having been a do-or-die objective. At work next day she falls into a sort of troubled trance, after hearing Brigitte and the constant old customer mawkishly eye-to-eye on dealing with men—“He was practically on his knees…” Being allowed to go home early due to her alarming lack of concentration on the job—she is caught up by Brigitte (“You feeling alright, Love?”) in sitting staring at some clothes on her lap, her eyes hardening in being interrupted with her real work—she meanders quite aimlessly around the flat, perhaps peripatetically rolling the dice in hopes of coming up with a winning, winsome number, and she pauses at the seemingly happy-go-lucky lover-boy’s shaving razor. The phone rings (a hang-up, later resolved to be from Helen’s beau’s wife) and she answers in a timid, power-compromised voice, having become lost in outer space. She goes to Helen’s bedroom, measures herself up to one of her sister’s outfits and in closing the mirrored closet door has a sensation of a man being in the room (the old lady had babbled on about men, “There’s only one thing they want…”; but the assault she wilts in supposing would be far wider and far more insidious than that). She is momentarily shocked; but, more significantly, she quickly recovers from that hysteria accompanied by a harsh operatic musical chord. Her reckoning would have brought to bear (almost subliminally and therefore not allowing of efficient development) that her real adversaries are not low-rent home-invaders but civilized, mainstream weaklings, like Colin, who eat away at her heart with impeccable manners. In the darkness of the night she slowly and repeatedly runs her finger across the wall. As with the crack on the sidewalk, though superficial observers may regard such becalming as sheer disintegration, a more patient observer would follow the tracings and their kinetics as being serious research on the order of cyclotronic projects, only more to the point (operators of cyclotrons having a track record of being no sharper than Colin). Footsteps in the public hallway throw her off balance for a little while; she blinks hard and then drifts off to sleep. Next morning, in the course of her endeavor, she runs bath water and forgets it until it overflows, as if she were a peculiar version of an absent-minded professor. In preparing to go out for relief from the tightness and inertia bedevilling her, she fetches her shoes (the same ones lining up vis-a-vis the crack on the sidewalk) from the disparate points of the flat where she kicked them off the day before. In pulling the second one from under a chest she becomes fascinated by the motion of her hand upon the leather and upon the floor. She walks across a bridge in the raw grey light. Out of nowhere a speeding car roars by. The accompanying music is in the cadence of a military march. She rapidly and repeatedly runs her thumb across one of her nostrils.
This gesture, which could be mistaken for a sign of her needing to see a doctor, is far closer to a baseball pitcher waving off a sign, a pitch selection. The core of this narrative, we have, I think, to recognize, has thus quite unequivocally settled into a rather disconcerting struggle to manage a mounting embarrassment in the area of carnal sufficiency. She has clearly not been seized by circumstances beyond her control, but rather by circumstances she can do something about only by mustering most extraordinary courage and its yield of fertile forward momentum (within which odious deterrents become strange partners). Seeing the odds to have become insupportable (Just before leaving for the Leaning Tower, Helen tears into her for trashing her “good things” from the boyfriend. “Little whore!” On a dime she’s sweetness and light on departing for fun), Carol (having been counting on a pitch selection full of knucklers, curves and off-speed offerings) reaches back for her fastball packing deadly motion and velocity deriving from a lifetime, however brief, of being nicked by infuriating aliens. The fortress-promising context of her one-person flat/retreat finds her not only putting in some practice throwing fireballs off the plate (gratifyingly imagining a huge fracture popping by a light switch as she turns it on to cast light upon an utterly undependable range of motion) but also laying down a couple of career-ending pitches way inside. Padding around her tiny domain in her dressing gown, taking on the aura of an invalid or fragile housebound senior, she eventually finds herself in bed imagining being raped. Having thus quelled that dead end with recourse to her patrician physical advantages (The popular conjecture that her flaming malaise could only have been occasioned by having been raped by her father [Helen being, then, strangely immune] does not even remotely reach the area of seriousness), she receives a call from Colin and she hangs up without a word. A brief return to the business of perfection—Brigitte urging her to see a Charlie Chaplin movie where Charlie eats his shoe and someone tries to eat him on the false assumption that he was a chicken—sends her bowing out forever from that all-too-human concern (though she musters a laugh along with her colleague, a tantalizing brush with the lightening up being her major challenge), only to be assailed by Colin at the door of her leaning sanctuary. Finding her unwelcoming he smashes open the closure to a failing intimacy, during the action of which she avails herself of a sturdy bat, a candle holder in fact—a rare case of a pitcher able to hit to strong effects. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” the overmatched and well-meaning base-stealer declares. “It’s all so sordid…” (“Tell me about it,” the unsmiling beauty could well be telling herself.) The frequency of the blows which take him out of the game—as with a follow-up operation of stabbing (with that razor) countless times the landlord who came for the overdue rent, tried to light her up and ended doing most of the paying—is what really rocks here. It evokes a situation where only an infinite range of damage could come close to settling what she thinks of the world at large. Her futile attempts to bring order to the heart of the diamond—dumping Colin into the accident-prone tub (even giving him a little bath) and covering the other bleeding man by burying him under an upturned sofa—show us faint traces of a bid for equilibrium that does not belong in the Major Leagues.
Between the first and second doses of vigilante justice, she hears that skiffle group going by. Definitely not her kind of music, but there was unbeknownst something there for her to give the same kind of attention she gave those delicate nuances.
Polanski is at his best here, his best stuff resting firmly on his mastery of irony. As the landlord looks over his property having taken on the aspect of a poorly run landfill, she says (even she wouldn’t know why), “I can explain…” The leading light in a bowler replies, “I doubt that, my dear.” He turns to open the blinds, hopefully babbling, “Let’s have a little light on the subject.” When she protests, now a full-fledged denizen of darkness, he ripostes, “I’m not a bloody owl, you know… I thought I’d seen everything. This is a flaming mad house!” And, as things take their course, he insists, “There’s no need to be alone, you know.” That night she applies some lipstick. She even smiles. She tries to write something on a mirror, with her finger—more a dance than a literary performance. From there she finds herself in a corridor where the walls sprout hands and arms and try in vain to make her happily a denizen of creative mystery. The relatives return and as they unpack the car’s trunk the licence there reads I (first line) VME (second line)—4 ME. Helen and the helper are duly shocked and sickened. A neighbor says, “I’ll get her some brandy” [thinking it is Helen who has had a hard time]. The married man finds Carol under the bed and in his removing her from the domain we see that her eyes are a study in hate. She had been introduced as being “in love or something;” she had been likened to Cinderella, Genevieve and Cocteau’s Beauty; Helen had called her, in refuting the idea she should see a doctor, “She’s just sensitive…” Just sensitive and beautiful being not enough. And her plight sets in relief a mystery as to what would be enough here.
Terrific essay and great support by the screen caps. This taut psychological thriller might be my favorite Polanski. Catherine Deneuvre is brilliant in one of her most complex roles as the Belgian manicurist. The camerawork is coldly precise, and the use of the rotting potatoes and rabbit carcass make this descent into madness even more unsettling.
Thanks, Peter.
I like your attention to Catherine Deneuve’s gutsy performance and to the very alert optics concerning motion and solitary vigils. The rotting food is, I think, wonderfully deployed to (like the death-mask mud-pack at the outset) stake out the consequences of failing to rally. I also love the Chico Hamilton jazz factor. I’m a big fan of his virtuoso drumming and his knack in finding good personnel. Those drum segments do so much for conveying a desperate test of creativity.
One of the most harrowing of films, and one that deserves to be included in the horror genre. The lead actress redefines brilliance.
Awesome review by Jim Clark.
Thanks, Tim.
In the documentary, The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993), a gathering of the survivors (in Rochefort) of those who put together The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) under the aegis of Jacques Demy, Catherine Deneuve—whose sister, Françoise Dorleac (also in the cast) died immediately following filming—is the only figure composed enough to give an account to a public gathering. She was beautiful and bright and talented. But in Repulsion she needed to be more than that. Old Surrealists were more on the plane of “Shocking Schiaparelli.” Deneuve was a New Surrealist in her tour de force with our movie this week, a gold-plated notable with potential to burn. Too bad other auteurs—more like Melville than Demy—didn’t pursue the rich craziness that Polanski, for a brief moment, took charge of. To add to the irony, Melville did hire Deneuve; but only when he was at death’s door and too tired to rock!
The slow camera movements and expressionistic sound effects create a terrible mood, claustrophobic and eerie. Repulsion is rightly considered one fo Polanski’s greatest films, and his lead actress gives him his greatest performance. I finally read your review in its entirety Jim, and I can’t praise you enough for another example of stunning scholarly discourse, in this instance on a classic with few detractors.
Thanks, Sam
It’s remarkable and very kind of you to take the time reading such a long piece in the midst of a very busy week of producing and discussing with readers two excellent essays of your own.
Repulsion does, I agree, “create a terrible mood…” It is, strangely enough, the same crushing ordeal to be found with the protagonist, Barny, in Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest, which will be up on October 14. Carol and Barny are disparate soul mates. Their very different paths set in relief how the dynamic at stake can be played in infinite ways. Hidden, I think, within the issue—and most directly and brilliantly offered in the Melville film—is the question of how best to field that difficult fly ball. Both movies do, however, make it to the highlight reel!