Review of Repulsion (1965) by Rigel S — 11 Aug 2009

I consider it a shame to be seeing this film for the first time some 45 years after its premiere. I wish I had been among the film's initial audiences. "Repulsion" remains haunting, but I think it would have filled my sleep with nightmares and unsettled the waking hours, too. If the film feels too familiar today, it's only because it has cast such a wide shadow of influence over the narrative cinema writ large. The entire careers of David Lynch and David Cronenberg are shamelessly indebted to its canny mix of psychosexual panic and unnerving obsession with animal morbidity. The subset of American horror films devoted to freaking out over female sexual maturation begins here, with Deneuve's menstrual meltdown. There could be no "Halloween" without "Repulsion." Even Catherine Breillat's work seems like a conscious inversion of this film, as she pushes her heroines toward carnal experience at all costs. In short, it must have seemed like so much, maybe even everything, was possible after "Repulsion.".

To a certain extent, Polanski owes a debt of gratitude to the likes of Hitchcock, and Powell's brilliant "Peeping Tom," but the more proximate influences seem to come from the avant-garde, films like "Un Chien Andalou" and "Meshes of the Afternoon." In other words, Polanski cracked the mainstream cinema wide open with this elliptical tale of a little girl gone mad. Of course, that also means we could lay certain pernicious consequences at "Repulsion"'s doorstep--Hollywood's unrepentant and violent misogyny chief among them--but that would mean grossly misunderstanding Polanski's sympathy for his tortured innocent. Speaking of inversions, or perversions, the film's final shot is a masterful rejoinder to the closing frames of Truffaut's "400 Blows." Whereas in Truffaut's film the freeze frame zoom epitomizes Antoine's uncertain future, Polanski's use of the device takes us back into Carole's past; no explanation exists there, and no hope for a better future.