Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)

[X.]

Replusion (1965)

One of the best films ever made! Visually Polanski is the most daring I have seen him - he uses sound, cinematography and editing to craft a deliciously sinister psychological horror film. Consider the scene when Catherine Deneuve's character Carol is rising to the ceiling (or vice verse) and the scene transitions with raindrops on a car's boot. Or the bus throttling forward as the screen splits and wipes away seamlessly into the next! The fadeouts to black with key scenes bring even more edge to the foreboding creepiness.

Deneuve is brilliant - sympathetic and sexy and convincingly delusional. The film's violent and perverse for any time – Carol’s 'visitor' comes to rape her each night, and on one of such nights - after having had enough of it - she decides to get back at him, fuck him back, by dressing up and wearing makeup! The cracks in the walls and floor, the tick-tock of the clock, the faint sounds of happy children in the background, the seeming mundanity of her life...all of these are essential ingredients in Polanski's masterpiece of madness and the supernatural. The scene with the switchblade in Carol's hand which only the audience can see and not the landlord about to be slashed is something Hitchcock himself would dream of. A brilliant brilliant film that is shocking and genuinely scary.


Rating:
  out of 

[sandeep]

wow... a 5* by ak... this movie must be good... can i borrow your copy?

[X.]

wow... a 5* by ak... this movie must be good... can i borrow your copy?

Don't worry, dear friend, I'll sort you out!

[fizz]

Repulsion

Polanski's second film, and his first in the English language, is an even more calculated and intense ride than his stunning debut Knife in the water. As a movie, it is one that most expertly balances the thin line between psychological horror and blood splatter horror, being at once both and excelling in huge amounts at each. Urban life in a London apartment is the subject, but so is sexual repression, violent outrages and bloody, grisly murders. These murders are shown being commited onscreen, but their aftermath is never fully disclosed. Could they just be hallucinations in the mind of a lonely, possibly molested young girl (played with expert nuance by Catherine Deneuve, always giving us a thousand yard stare)? A scream near the end could mean anything - that the murders did happen or something equally grisly (we see a dead, uncooked rabbit taken out from the fridge and placed in the living room). Has the distinction of possibly the creepiest last shot I have ever seen, where the camera keeps zooming into a picture on a table till it stops on a young girl, looking away from the camera. Has similarities to Hitchcock's Psycho, but makes it look like a childrens film in comparison. Groundbreaking visuals and direction, even by todays standards. Presented in more fitting black and white.

Rating: 5/5

[fizz]

More about that brilliant, brilliant ending:

Polanski took great pains in creating the proper composition and details for his nightmarish visuals—by constructing, for example, a hallway that actually did expand and elongate throughout the picture with the help of wall panels. In an interview with Ivan Butler, editor Alastair McIntyre comments on the film's amazingly-difficult final sequence: "It was made in three  shots. First the camera zoomed in as close as possible to the photograph, but we couldn't get anywhere like near enough to the eye. So we had an enormous blow-up made of the picture, much bigger than the wall of an ordinary room. We tracked in again as far as we could, but even this wasn't enough, so we continued with a miniature camera right into the girl's eye, and the three shots were joined together by `invisible' dissolves."

[fizz]

And the answer to the million dollar question, "whose lucky hands had the distinction to boldly go where we wish ours could"?:

Her hallucinations become more intense by now — the hallway becomes a deathtrap as arms burst through the plaster (two of them belonging to screenwriter Gérard Brach) and grab at her.

[animatedude]

ok ladies,take a look at this!



* New, restored high-definition digital transfer (with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
* Audio commentary featuring director Roman Polanski and actress Catherine Deneuve
* A British Horror Film (2003), a documentary on the making of Repulsion, featuring interviews with Polanski, producer Gene Gutowski, and cinematographer Gil Taylor
* A 1964 television documentary filmed on the set of Repulsion, featuring rare footage of Polanski and Deneuve at work
* Theatrical trailer
* PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar and curator Bill Horrigan

[madali]

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Here is some strange irony for me. Roman Polanski's 1965 film about a trouble young female rape victim is extremely good. The girl's troubled past manifests itself as her revulsion of men, a strange feelings of disgust towards certain things, but at a same time, something in her pulls her towards things she finds hateful and disgusting, and she has scary hallucinations, such as being raped at night in dreamlike scenes, and hands coming out of the wall to grope at her. The film is very effective, and probably the creepiest film about a woman's rape trauma that I have ever seen.

Well, the irony is that, Polanski makes an extremely empathic film about a young woman that was raped as a child, and then goes on to rape one himself. Almost a decade after this film, Polanski has sex with a 13 year old girl, who he, apparently, performs oral, vaginal, and best of all, anal sex with her. One would think that after making such an effective portrayal of how badly a childhood incident can cause a person, he'd not do it himself. But hey, maybe "Repulsion" is Polanski's attempt at making a romantic love story?

4/5

[X.]

Polanski is such a class act!

(Also: I just read the review I wrote for REPULSION. And I cringed at my ridiculous writing and cleric love for the film!)

[madali]

Thats before studying and making film killed your enthusiasm for film! Maybe once your see the secrets of film, it ruins the magic.

[X.]

Thats before studying and making film killed your enthusiasm for film! Maybe once your see the secrets of film, it ruins the magic.

This is very true. My filmmaker friends and I discuss/deplore this effect at least once a month. My favorite way to understand this phenomenon is by thinking of a mechanic: with a car he sees and hears only what's *inside*.

I was the happiest when I didn't know.

[animatedude]

yes ignorance is a bless.

[madali]

You are a happy person, arent you, Animatedude?

[animatedude]

You are a happy person, arent you, Animatedude?

No i'm not but i'm trying to be a happy person, what about you?