Review of Repulsion (1965) by George F — 19 Jul 2016

Repulsion follows Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian girl that moved with her older sister in England. Carol is a beautiful, timid girl that works in a beauty salon, constantly having to halt the advances of various men. The balance that she has found (not without effort ) in her life, begins to crack when her sister declares that she will go in Italy for holidays with her married boyfriend. When Carol is left alone, we begin to notice exactly how frayed are the ends of her sanity.

After that first few minutes of the film there are two things that strike the viewer. The first is simple, it stares right at you, it is Deneuve's breathtaking beauty. The second is more subtle, it is Polanski's steel grasp. It feels that he has total control of every frame; every shot tells you what he wants to tell you, without requiring effort from your part; every single detail sets the mood the way he wants it to, without the need to result in tricks.

His austere, but firm grasp reminded me the way the classic silent films were directed, and from he top of my head I cannot remember a "talkie" that matches this feeling I describe -Harakiri (1962) comes close. If we compare Repulsion with Persona (1966), both excellent films share a lot of sub-themes, we notice that while Polanski makes it easy for us to be engulfed by the film, Bergman demands a lot from us. To be fair, Persona is more complex, but my argument still stands I believe. A good example of what I'm describing is when after the first act, you sense that something is wrong, simply because of Carol's slightly uncombed hair.

And there are a lot of things going wrong. Carol, alone in her apartment, has to find balance between her repulsion of men's vulgarity, and the senses that her body craves -and knows fully well that it is those abhorrent men that will provide them. To paraphrase Placebo: "She wants the sin without the sinner".

Carol's journey until her inevitable plunge into madness, is one of haunting beauty, without requiring cinephile tendencies to enjoy. A dark masterpiece. 8.5/10.