AKA Diary of Forbidden Dreams

DIRECTED BY: Roman Polanski

FEATURING: Sydne Rome, Marcello Mastroianni, Hugh Griffith

PLOT: An American hitchhiker in Italy loses her clothes and finds a Mediterranean villa

full of oddball characters.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: What? is an absurdist sex comedy that’s highly absurd, mildly sexy, and not one bit comic.  It’s weird, all right, but also slapdash and frequently insufferable; in short, not good enough to make a List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.

COMMENTS:  Some films are ahead of their times, misunderstood on release, and are ripe for reappraisal years later.  And sometimes, the critics get it right the first time, as when they ran screaming from early showings of What?.  Sandwiched in between Roman Polanski’s intricately constructed classics Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), What? seems like the improvised work of an overconfident director who believes he can do no wrong.  Polanski may be a genius, but light tone and full-out surrealism are a poor match to his talent for creating tension through subtly weird atmospheres.  The overarching concept is great, the assembled talent is impeccable, the Mediterranean setting is sublimely elegant, Sydne Rome is a perfect specimen of femininity… yet the script sucks all the life and fun out of the movie, delivering one scene after another that lands with a dull thud.  Heroine Rome, a hippie-esque ingenue, escapes a gang rape and flees to a villa inhabited by a cadre of eccentrics.  Foremost among them is Marcello Mastroianni, uncomfortably playing a dirty old man and ex-pimp.  Despite rumors of homosexuality and venereal diseases, Rome inexplicably falls for the lecher, and their trysts involve Mastroianni dressing in a tiger skin while she beats him or dressing like Napoleon while he beats her.  It’s a novelty to see an actor of Mastroianni’s status willingly degrade himself this way, but it’s neither as fun or as funny as it sounds.  Other poorly-sketched weirdos populating the mansion include a scuba diver (portrayed by Polanski) nicknamed Mosquito, a piano playing doctor, a dying patriarch who also turns out to be a dirty old man, a priest, and a naked woman wandering about the grounds.  Absurd gags fall flat: in one of the earliest, a housemaid sprays shaving cream in the air in an attempt to kill a fly.  Later, a workman will paint the back of Sydne’s appealing thigh blue, a rather uninteresting incident that the script insists on reminding us of over and over.  The biggest running gag is that someone keeps stealing Sydne’s clothes, although the thief doesn’t pilfer quite enough of them; there are long stretches of the movie where Rome runs around clothed. Not coincidentally, the movie then starts to drag.  A few clever ideas emerge, such as when certain scenes start to repeat themselves with slight variations, but in general the movie misses several golden opportunities to ratchet the absurdity up to truly entertaining levels.  Particularly disappointing is the dialogue; the potential for clever nonsense interplay between the innocent American and the depraved Europeans devolves into crude, uninteresting jokes.  A classical music score, references to Heraclitus, and paintings by Francis Bacon and Théodore Géricault in the background are deployed in an attempt to dress up the sleazy material in the clothes of high art.  What? isn’t recommended, but it can be viewed, and even enjoyed, as a novelty.  It’s unhinged, unpredictable, and full of that slightly naive and innocent late 1960s/early 1970s experimentalism that can be refreshing in this cynical age.  But it’s clearly a product of its time, not a work that transcends it.

The film that What? most resembles is the star-studded (Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Ringo Starr) 1968 erotic misfire Candy, a doomed attempt to translate Terry Southern’s satirical porn novel to the screen.  The concept of an erotic version of “Alice in Wonderland,” with a wide-eyed innocent encountering a cast of sexual deviants, has great promise, but has never been executed properly on screen.   Alex de Renzy’s XXX feature Pretty Peaches (1978) is probably the movie that runs the farthest with that particular ball.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Polanski seems to be enjoying a weird, borderline-nonsensical joke at our expense, one without a punchline or a setup… a self-indulgent mess masquerading as a trippy free-for-all.”–Nathan Rabin, The Onion A.V. Club (DVD)

1. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle 3 (2002) . Only the third of Barney’s epic Cremaster Cycle, made over an eight year period, has made it’s way to any type of video release, which is criminally unfortunate. The Guggenheim Museum, who financed it, exhibits the Cycle and describes it as a  ”a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore the processes of creation.”  Trailers are available on the Cremaster website; www.cremaster.net. The third movie is available via Amazon and other outlets, albeit at expensive prices [Ed. Note: the version of Cremaster 3 that's commercially available is not actually the full movie, but a 30 minute excerpt that's still highly collectible as the only Cremaster footage released].  The Cremaster Cycle is complex, challenging, provocative and not for the attention span-challenged.

2. Guy Maddin‘s Dracula-Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). Guy’s Dracula ballet, choreographed to Mahler.  Just when you though nothing more could be done with this old, old story.  Of course, we are talking Mr. Maddin here.

3. Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968). Bergman’s ode to German Expressionism has been labeled his sole horror film. Hour is a further continuation of frequent Bergman themes—the defeated artist, loss of God, nihilism—and stars Bergman regular Max Von Sydow.  Some find this dull and slow, others find it mesmerizing and nightmarish.

4. Roman Polanski‘s The Tenant (1976) returned this consummate craftsman back to the territory of Repulsion and remains one of his best films.  Polanski is now facing extradition charges for having sexual relations with a willing, underage girl thirty years ago, who he has paid millions to and already served jail time for.  Meanwhile, several followers of the man that butchered his wife and unborn child forty years ago walk free.  Now that’s true American Horror Hypocrisy for you.

5. Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968) almost feels like something from Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. This sublime, allegorical, surreal work is almost too beautiful, too haunting, and too unique for words.  Burt Lancaster, as usual in his mid to late career, is superb as the suburban middle age swimmer who decides to go home on a bright sunny day by swimming through all the neighborhood pools.  The dreaded conclusion is as inevitable as it is draining.

6. David Lynch‘s Inland Empire (2006), shot on video, is a beautifully textured film.  It almost seems like Lynch is in a return to form that, perhaps, began with Mulholland Drive. Laura Dern plays numerous, angst-ridden characters in a  plot that might be described as dissonant film noir.

7. David Cronenberg‘s Crash (1996), based off the J.G. Ballard novel, aptly divided and provoked critics, as well as viewers. The film is as cold, metallic, and dissecting as it’s subject.

8.William Beaudine’s Sparrows (1926). Yes, Beaudine  could actually direct once, and this one is a “high melodrama” Mary Pickford silent that just happens to be her best film.  She is the charge of dastardly Simon Legree’s orphan slaves. There are  swamps, alligators, climatic chases, dead children, and a cameo by Jesus.  If it sounds like pure schlock, it is, but done right.

9. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932). The Vampire is dispatched by suffocating in flour.  The imagery is startling, and the whole film casts a hypnotic, becalmed milieu.  If you thought Tod Browning’s Dracula was static… Criterion finally released a worthwhile copy on dvd.

10. Damon Zex‘s Waking Nightmare. Former public access underground college cult hero Zex tackles the grand guignol, Zex style.  What’s that mean? Well, one could start with Zex Zombie performing cunnilingus on Tamara and eating her bloodied tampon right out of her. Move from that to Zex’s  Evil Tarot Torture.

11. Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone (1982). Even the midnight cult crowd can’t unanimously handle this one.  It was unavailable for half of forever, but there were some of us who waited with pins and needles for this mix of Oingo Boingo (recall when Elfman wasn’t repetitive?) , Minnie the Moocher, Herve Villechaize, and Satan himself in one glorious, inexplicable brew.

12. Mack V. Wright’s  Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937).  Energetic B-Western horror with standby cow dude Bob Livingston.  Bob finds  a curse in skull temple and ends up battling Satan-worshiping natives and mummies.  Pass the popcorn and loads of butter, please.

13. Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers (1967).  At one point Reeves seemed like the  horror genre’s new L’enfant terrible.  He made this and the superb Witchfinder General. Then, he was dead at 25 from a drug overdose.  Karloff is actually good again, possibly because he is somewhat cast against type, but Catherine Lacey is even better.  They are an elderly couple who have invented some kind of mumbo jumbo scientific device where they can experience youth again by inhabiting the body of a young man (60′s genre stud Ian Ogilvy)  who…  oh, the plot doesn’t really matter. This voyeuristic black comedy has got style aplenty.

DIRECTED BY: Roman Polanski

FEATURING: Catherine Deneuve

PLOT:  At first glance, manicurist Carole (Catherine Deneuve) seems merely to be painfully shy.  The early portions of the film follow her in her daily routine, and we grow to realize that her mental problems go much deeper: she daydreams, she seems to be barely on speaking terms with the outside world, she is dependent on her sister (who wants to have a life of her own) to care for her, and she is repulsed by men.  When her sister goes on a two week vacation, Carole’s fragile condition deteriorates, and we travel inside of her head and witness her terrifying paranoid delusions firsthand.

BACKGROUND:

• This was director Roman Polanski’s first English language movie, after achieving critical success with the Polish language thriller Nóż w wodzie [Knife in the Water] (1962).  The relatively recent success of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) undoubtedly helped the film’s marketability, as it could be billed as a female variation on the same theme.  But despite dealing with insanity and murder, Polanski’s film turned out nothing like Hitchcock’s classic; whereas Psycho was clearly entertainment first, with horrors meant to thrill like a roller-coaster, Repulsion was relentlessly tense, downbeat and disturbing, strictly arthouse fare.
• Ethereal Star Catherine Denueve (who had been the lover of, and given her first break in films by, roguish director Roger Vadim) was coming off her first major success in the lighthearted 1964 musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg].  Playing a dangerous, asexual, schizophrenic woman in a role that called for little dialogue immediately after her role as the romantic lead in a musical demonstrated her tremendous range and helped establish her as one of the greatest actresses of the late 1960s and 70s.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  There are many enduring images to choose from, including the hare carcass and simple close-ups of Deneuve’s eyeballs, but the iconic image is Carole walking down a narrow corridor, as gray hands reach out from inside the walls to grope at her virginal white nightgown. (The scene is a sinister variation on a similar image from Jean Cocteau’s surrealist classic Le Belle et La Bette [Beauty and the Beast] (1946)).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Although there are several otherwordly, expressionistic dream

Original trailer for Repulsion

sequences in the film, Polanski creates a terribly tense and claustrophobic atmosphere even before the nightmares come with odd camera angles and the strategic use of silence broken by invasive ambient noises.  As Carole floats around her empty apartment, silent, alone, and ghostlike, ordinary objects and sounds take on an otherworldly quality.  The effect is unlike any other.

COMMENTS:  Polanski begins the film with a close-up of a woman’s eyeball, an opening that is reminiscent of the first shot fired in the Surrealist film revolution.  Later on, a straight razor features in the story prominently, strengthening this connection.  And, of course, the famous scene of the hands morphing out of the walls inevitably brings to mind the other iconic Surrealist film image: Cocteau’s candelabras.

But despite the nods to his influences, by nature Polanski isn’t a surrealist, but a Symbolist.  In Repulsion, Polanski weaves images masterfully, but although they may be obscure, they are never incongruous and irrational juxtapositions, like the Surrealists sought.  After opening credits play over the shot of the eye, the next image we see is a close-up of a woman’s cracking facial beauty mask.  Cracks recur throughout Repulsion, and obviously symbolize Carole’s deteriorating mind.  Early on, Carole looks at a developing fissure in the apartment wall and muses, “I must get this crack mended”; much later on, a crack in her bedroom wall breaks open and draws her into a particularly nasty nightmare.  Select symbols, both visual and auditory, reverberate throughout the film in a way that creates a subliminal narrative that, in an important way, is more important to the story than the minimalist plot.  Besides eyes, razors, and cracks, we also catch echoes of the sprouting potatoes and a hare’s corpse, along with the ticking clock, the dripping faucet, the street band with the spoon player (Polanski’s cameo appearance), the doorbell and phone (which sound exactly the same), the tolling bell and the laughter rising from the yard of the nunnery.  That the first shot of the narrative should be a crack appearing on a woman’s face telegraphs Polanski’s story about the crumbling of a woman’s personality.

The imagery and symbolism aren’t the only things that are masterful about Repulsion.  Critics have correctly noted Polanski’s use of sound, which expertly balances silence and atmospheric noise with judicious bursts from the alternately swinging and dissonant jazz score.  The superlative black and white cinematography and can’t be forgotten, either; there are times when a shot of three aging potatoes looks like a grayscale Max Ernst landscape.  The photography often has a way of transforming the ordinary into the strange and unfamiliar, a visual metaphor for the way Carole sees the world.

But the single most important element that makes the film a success is the magically glacial performance of Catherine Deneuve.  She is in the screen almost all the time, and says almost nothing.  In fact, except when she is terrified, she is frequently emotionless, staring off into space in her own dream world, totally blank faced and inscrutable.  And yet, watching her, it seems impossible to believe that other actress could have captured Carole’s insanity and made it seem plausible.  Deneuve must have known and observed a schizophrenic during her youth; she perfectly captures the subtle tics, the chewing on the lip, the spastic scratching (so unselfconscious and unfeminine), the swiping about her face as if swatting away invisible insects.

It doesn’t hurt that the face is classically beautiful, of course; casting an ugly actress in the role would have made the movie unbearably repulsive.  The tension between Deneuve’s exterior beauty and the grotesqueness of the world behind those eyeballs is the contrast that compels our interest.

In the beginning of the movie, we observe Carole entirely from the outside.  We are given no clue why she is detached.  We simply study her as a beautiful curiosity.  We see her the way her co-workers and her would-be beau does: she seems shy, distracted, perhaps even dull and flighty, but at the same time mysterious and vulnerable.  But when her sister leaves on vacation and Carole is left alone in the creaky, haunted apartment, our focus suddenly shifts from looking at Carole to seeing the world through her eyes.  Our first hint that we have entered a new world is when, along with her, we catch a glimpse of a man’s figure in the mirror–a man who couldn’t possibly be there (and in fact isn’t, when she turns to look).  Soon after, we are thrust into her (literal) dreams and nightmares.  And things grow increasingly worse from there, until we the viewers struggle to tell whether what is happening to her is real or imaginary.  We find ourselves traveling with her down that long dark corridor with the grasping hands.

There are a few things to criticize about the film, although none are serious enough to keep Repulsion from earning its five star rating.  Polanski lingers a bit too much over the setup.  Things don’t become really interesting until the sister leaves on vacation at about the 40 minute mark.  This is artistically justifiable, as the perfectly innocent items Polanski introduces in the early reels–the cracks in the wall, the rabbit, the dripping faucet, the foolishly misguided suitor–will recur with a sinister cast once Carole’s break comes.  But the slowness of the opening scenes will unfortunately keep many from actually experiencing the film.

Another frequent criticism is that, true to its name, Repulsion is relentlessly unpleasant.  It creates a tension that is never pleasantly relieved by the triumph over evil; Norman Bates is never defeated, Carole never escapes herself, the audience is never rewarded for allowing their nerves to be grated.  This is true; Repulsion isn’t entertaining.  But what it does, in taking us unflinchingly inside the unpleasant world of madness, it does better than any other movie.  Catharsis would have rung untrue in Repulsion, and blunted its impact.  If there had been a single artistic slip, the film would have sunk from being an unforgettable classic into being just an interesting but disturbing experiment.  We don’t want every film to be like Repulsion, but we can be glad that at least one exists.

The last criticism is my own, and it goes to the heart of the film.  The objection is there in the very title: Repulsion.  Too much is made of the idea that Carole’s illness is related to her fear of men, her sexual repression, and her possible history of childhood sexual abuse.  The audience is beat over the head with this idea, from Carole’s dreams of rape to her obsessive tooth-brushing after her suitor manages to steal a kiss to the fact that she only seems briefly normal when she interacts with either her sister or her lone friend, a female coworker, outside the presence of men.  Many interpret the final shot–a camera pan to a family photograph that lingers on the face and eyes of Carole as a young girl, sporting the same dead-eyed, distant stare as she does as a young woman–as a hint that it is childhood sexual abuse has caused Carole’s repulsion, leading eventually to obsession and madness.  The idea that Carole’s current repulsion towards reality stems from her “repulsion” to a past rapist seems offered as a sop to those who lust for a solution to the puzzle of her madness, as well as an excuse for Polanski to explore the dark side of human sexuality that has always fascinated him (sadly, in real life as well as in art).

Repulsion is, in fact, the most accurate depiction of schizophrenia ever put on film (there wasn’t really much competition in this field, until 1993′s Clean, Shaven).   This is true whether Polanski and Deneuve knew the name of the disease they were recreating or not. It is unfortunate that Polanski chose to suggest a psychosexual solution to the mystery of Carole’s mind, because the idea that sexual dysfunction was the root cause of every psychiatric disease known to man or woman–from frigidity to nymphomania, from fear of heights to schizophrenia–is a now-discredited relic of then-trendy Freudian psychology.  (Many psychiatrists now doubt that there is much link between schizophrenia and childhood sexual abuse).  Sex is central to human existence, but it doesn’t hold quite the monopoly on the unconscious that Freud, and certain 1960s movie directors, believed.

Carole’s repulsion towards men is more interesting as a symptom of her condition then it is as a cause.  Her disorder goes deeper than a mere fear of men.  When she literally barricades herself inside her apartment-inside her own crumbling mind-she is not merely hiding from an outside world where every construction worker on the corner is a potential rapist.  She is hiding away from humanity, from reality, from existence itself.  Schizophrenia–literally, “splitting (or ‘cracking’?) of the mind”–is terrifying because it is a pathology that arises spontaneously, mysteriously, without pat explanation.  Our desire to find a “cause” for it, to understand and master our own fears about our sanity, is a sign of our own mental infirmity.

Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to embrace this psychoanalytic interpretation of the film to praise it.  Polanski has left the root of Carole’s illness ambiguous enough to allow us freedom to ignore his Freudian blunders.  It is possible to see the final image of the dreamy waif merely as evidence that Carole has always been this way: that she was singled out by random lot to live out a brief life of torment.  In the end, the source of Carole’s irrational terrors isn’t crucial to the movie’s impact.  It’s the stark document of what happens in her during those seemingly endless nightmare days and nights, locked away from the world, that sticks with us, and makes us afraid.  The possibility that our own minds may betray us and drag us down to Hell is a far more frightening than any psycho-slasher in a hockey mask ever could be.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s clinical Grand Guignol, and the camera fondles the horrors… Undeniably skillful and effective, all right-excruciatingly tense and frightening. But is it entertaining? You have to be a hard-core horror-movie lover to enjoy this one.” -Pauline Kael (contemporaneous)

“…a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol-as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist’s notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.” -Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (DVD)

“Polanski’s triumph is a weird, tense depolarization of space, a chipping away at psychological walls so that fear and desire become synonymous…” -Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)

IMDB ENTRY: Repulsion

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Trailers from Hell: Micheal Lehmann on ‘Repulsion’ – The director of Heathers and Meet the Applegates gives his thoughts on the Repulsion trailer

DVD INFO (UPDATED 8/1/09):  After years of shamefully subpar editions, Repulsion has finally been rescued by the ever-reliable Criterion Collection and given a 2-disc special release (buy). The set features a new director-approved transfer of the film, commentary by Polanski and Deneuve, two documentary features, trailers, and a booklet of essays. Also available on Blu-ray (buy).

The previous releases of the film are now obsolete, except for bargain hunters who want a single disc release. The original information on past releases is included below for those who still may be interested.

The Anchor Bay release (which appears to be out of print) is the superior version, and contains commentary by both Polanski and Deneuve as well as a featurette on the British horror film.  Barring a used copy of that release, the Latin American import version (which is in English, and plays on US and Canadain Region 1 DVD players) (buy) is the next best bet. Many have complained of poor picture quality (and an unforgiveable pan-and-scan aspect ratio) on the Entertainment Programs release (buy), but sadly it may often be the best and cheapest version available.