Review of Repulsion (1965) by Gareth H — 26 Aug 2008

Mental illness looks much better in a nightie than a straight jacket. Odd juxtaposition of elements from midsixties art cinema. There's an abiding (and prescient) interest in a generation gap working throughout the narrative. You see this in a lot of cinema from the period (especially in England). Here it is especially bleak, and the film doesn't really seem to offer an alternative. There is no happiness in this film, just a slew of characters who either want something of insist upon it. From PSYCHO, we have the title, subject matter, violence, twists, and bathroom. The London scenes do anything but swing. It seems more like the environs of something like The Caretaker (1963), or any of the British New Wave films of the early sixties. The walking around scenes feel like a cancerous Cléo de 5 à 7. And the film ends with a close up vaguely reminiscent of (perhaps even revising) les quartes cent coups, only with a tragic image of a young woman from the past.

All the while, I kept turning over two things in my mind. One was something someone says on a DVD about late hard boiled writer Jim Thompson. He said that Thompson world was a world where people behave strangely because it was an alcoholic's world where Thompson had written out the alcohol. The other was an addiction medicine specialist talking on a late night radio programme about The Aviator back when it came out. The good doctor said that a lot of Howard Hughes's more Howard Hughesish behaviour (including the jars of urine) was consistent cocaine addiction.

REPULSION seems to live in the same world, but again with the substances washed out. It also was interesting how much of the female gothic in many ways seems to screen out sexual abuse. Nevertheless, mental illness looks much better in a nightie... on Catherine Deneuvre. Something about nighties backlit in black and white...