Review of Repulsion (1965) by Paul Z — 03 Mar 2009

Though the psychological thriller genre is highly populated with countless contemporary and vintage classics in both film and literature, there haven't been many films like Roman Polanski's Repulsion. It's not a perfect film, but it's a strangely memorable one. It is very leisurely and quiet. Yet instead of seeing peril through the eyes of clear-cut victims, the viewpoint is the killer's, who, debatably, is also the central victim. The beautiful Catherine Deneuve plays a young, remote and inaccessible woman who appears to go through the apparent signs of schizophrenia. She slowly withdraws into her flat and her issues thicken until they pressure her to snap.

Repulsion could have been titled Repression. It deals so well with figurative imagery of a strait-jacketed mind's breakdown that the film could've been about a Conservative Republican just as easily as it's about a young woman with a troubled childhood.

For confinement is a pivotal element in the movie. More than a setting, it's a narrative bedrock that defines the film. The economic form and its visual style concentrates on a character who allows the film to concentrate extremely on the signification of reclusiveness, creating an intrinsic journal of the character and her repulsed reaction to the world. An unpolished visualization of confinement and singularity is inexorable in order to give a cinematic form to the actual mind.

The title exudes the eye's judgmentally conservative iris. The editing sets up an initial connection. What confronts the eye immediately signifies hatred, hostility, an object of judgment. The comically reeling credits are against the obstinacy and self-reflexiveness of the iris's circle. The eyeball, birthing this mentality of distortion, flits within the sockets which remains inexpressive. This inner animation feels as if to lack reason. To be sure, the tight shot ends on Deneuve's devoid face, as she inattentively manicures a customer. Her inanimate, lukewarm face is in this way intently akin to this cold eye. This close-up acts as Deneuve's milieu which is visionally disfigured. So this dreamlike film is not founded in narrative neutrality but in semiotics of idiosyncrasy, born through fallacies and limitations.

If this claustrophobic movie refers to the horror genre, via its clashing between what is actual and what is surreal, in mirroring Deneuve's mental state, it is more focused upon examination than a chain of cause and effect. The charm is that Polanski correlates horror with his protagonist's intensifying secludedness in order to build a biased portrait which might give a face to a tangible fear, not from an extrinsic root but from an internal one.