Review of Repulsion (1965) by Alvin Y — 16 Jun 2012

Repulsion, Great Movies.

"Repulsion" is a great example of how to make a truly scary movie. The trick is not to fill the screen with monsters or indestructible serial killers, it is to portray fear in a way that will be familiar to the audience. It is clear from early on the film that the lead character, Carol, played brilliantly by an extremely young-looking Catherine Deneuve, is not exactly normal. When her sister leaves her alone in their shared London apartment for a few days, however, the things that scare Carol are the sorts of things that have scared a lot of people spending the night alone, such as hearing and imagining footsteps in the hallway and the like. Of course, while normal people get a brief fright from such a thing, Carol descends into a madness of hallucinations. The movie is seen almost entirely from her point of view, using techniques borrowed by later directors such as Darren Aronofsky for his movie, "Pi" (which I haven't seen), which gives the entire movie a claustrophobic feeling that enhances the impact of Carol's hallucinations.

There are no doubt people who would like to explicate this film as an exploration of sexual repression or the like, and perhaps they are indeed hitting the mark in doing so, but this film works brilliantly as pure cinema, with no metaphoric subtext needed.

Polanski is excellent in establishing Carol's progressive mental decay. She listens to a couple make love through the walls of her apartment -- itself enhancing her own repressed sexuality, a very striking moment of eroticism. She begins acting oddly not only at home, but at work, even while walking down the street. Polanski uses some experimental jazz to manifest her mind spinning out of control much in the way he used it in some of the more nerve wracking sequences of âRosemary's Babyâ?. About 45 minutes into the movie -- roughly halfway -- we're treated to a blink or mis-image of a man standing opposite from Carol, reflected in her closet mirror. It's a powerful moment and one that didn't need the shocks used today. Using odd camera angles, photographing people in extreme upside down closeups, and showing increasingly imagined scenes of rape, Polanski creates a hellish scenario where a woman's mind is torn to pieces, and where we can't do anything to stop it but watch. It does add to Deneuve's powerhouse performance that much of her time on screen is spent nearly mute and by herself. Terror, and because of this, it becomes an internalized experienced that only becomes external through the set the apartment was modeled on and Deneuve's extreme acting, which is a revelation. The mundane, even the trivial, does a 180 degree turn and becomes chaotic, a reflection of reality gone to hell, and a beautiful woman turned inside-out due to her repressed feelings directed towards her father, who at that last haunting shot of the family portrait looks a little like the rapist -- disclosing the root of her intability and her hatred/desire of men.

With that, this is one of the most disturbing and yet shocking film that I've seen in a very long time about alienation and claustrophobic situation of a girl. Unlike Polanski's after films such as *Rosemary's Baby*?, *Chinatown*, *The Ghost Writer*?, this one is very very captivating and of course the title word âRepulsionâ? really fits to the character Carol, to her perspective and personality.