Repulsion (spine #483)

One of my favorite things about film is its ability to set an effecting mood so that the movie itself, and not just the actions on-screen, provides its own assault on the senses. "Repulsion" sets just such a mood and delivers a solid story, but it definitely requires extreme patience to get there. The movie follows Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a shy, young Belgian woman that lives with her sister, receives (and shuns) lots of male attention, and might just be borderline crazy. Carol, throughout the whole movie, almost never speaks. She sort of just looks at things and people as if she can't quite understand what's going on around her. This makes the beginning of the movie a bit of a struggle to get through, as you are not sure whether this is all character and nuanced-acting, or whether Denueve was really just a terrible actress. Thankfully, it's just a very long and drawn out way of establishing the rest of the film. There's a scene with Carol sitting on a bench looking at a crack in the sidewalk and something about this scene reassures that there is much more going on.

Soon after this, Carol's sister goes on a trip, leaving Carol at their apartment all on her own. This is where the film begins to take quite the surrealistic turn. Carol begins having fears and visions of a burglar breaking in and then raping her. Having seen Carol get upset and freak out over just the slightest bit of affection shown her, it makes this scene all the more powerful and damaging. The rape is far from graphic, but is shown in sporadic cuts with no sound except the ticking of a clock, adding to the ever-increasing tension. Yet, when Carol wakes up, she's all alone, the doors are still locked and it starts to become evident that the whole thing was in her mind.

Time begins to pass, expressed in the film by different forms of food that have been left out, and their gradual rot. As the loneliness and mental instability creep in more and more, so do the sexual dreams Carol has, sometimes as rape, sometimes as groping hands emerging from the apartment walls. Like the crack she saw earlier in the movie, Carol begins seeing cracks all over the apartment, all the while as she is dwindling more and more into madness, eventually escalating from her raw desires to violence and murder.

The movie, directed by Roman Polanski, has quite a bit of visual flair, especially for its time period (1965), and is filled with some truly intriguing effects that I won't spoil for you but are definitely impressive. Having no previous knowledge of the film before watching it, I was quite surprised and pleased to see it be an engaging thriller with some terrific horror elements with it. The movie itself totally relies on Deneuve's performance, which ends up being quite astounding, doing so much with so very little. Definitely a patient, slow-paced film, but one that I felt rewarded with having seen.