Repulsion (1965)
Directed by Roman Polanski

Film Review

All in the mind

In view of the welter of critical acclaim that Roman Polanski attracted with his first feature, Knife in the Water (1962), it seems odd that he had such difficulty finding a backer for his follow-up film.  Polanski's micro-budget debut feature may not have been well-received in his native Poland (where it had been filmed) but it won one major award (the FIPRESCI Prize) at the Venice Film Festival and received an Oscar nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film.  It also featured on the cover of Time Magazine, no surer sign that Polanski was the man of the moment.  Apart from contributing a segment to the 1964 French anthology film Les Plus belles escroqueries du monde (along with New Wave stars Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard), this hot new director remained inactive for over two years, concocting story ideas with his screenwriter-friend Gérard Brach but failing to find a film studio willing to take him on.  Bizarrely, it was a small English film production company specialising in exploitation films, Compton Group, that came to Polanski's rescue, with a friendly invitation to direct a low-budget horror film in London.  At the time, Compton majored in soft-core pornography and was eager to upgrade its reputation, so a collaboration with an up-and-coming art house sensation seemed a sure-fire way to achieve this objective.

Unfortunately for Compton, Polanski had no intention of hastily knocking out a standard schlock horror piece for what would be his first English language film.  Instead, he set his sights on making a far more sophisticated kind of psychological drama-thriller - in the mould of H.G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).  The derisory 65 thousand pound budget Polanski was offered soon proved to be woefully inadequate and he surpassed it by fifty per cent, partly through his habitual perfectionism which led to a continual slippage in the production schedule, but also because of his dogged insistence in employing a first rank cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, whose work on Dr Strangelove (1964) had greatly impressed him.  The film in question was Roman Polanski's first in a series of highly acclaimed iconic masterpieces - Repulsion.  With its chilling foray into the fractured mind of a schizophrenic, a world governed by extreme fear, alienation and incipient insanity, it establishes the distinctive mélange of visual and thematic tropes that would become characteristic of the director's oeuvre whilst anticipating his later great films.

Repulsion is the first entry in Polanski's so-called 'Apartment Trilogy', to be followed by Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976).  What connects these three films - three of the director's most original and frightening works - is the use of the artificial living space of the modern apartment as a trigger for a profound and horrific change in its inhabitant's persona.  The heightened social isolation that comes with apartment living, coupled with the fact that you can never really feel at home in a building that is owned by and shared with total strangers, exacerbates feelings of alienation and paranoia within the protagonist, resulting in an ever-growing disconnection from reality and confinement within his or her own inner world.  Of the three films, Repulsion is by far the most unsettling, partly because of the uncanny juxtaposition of realistic and expressionistic photography, which show a disorientating interblending of the everyday with nightmare fantasy, but mainly because it tackles so convincingly a subject that is possibly the most terrifying of all - a one-way descent into insanity.

The ice maiden cometh

At the time Roman Polanski made Repulsion in the mid-1960s the psycho-thriller had already been pretty well mined to death in British cinema, with Hammer Films (the studio most famous for its Gothic horror offerings) contributing some of the better examples of the genre - Paranoiac (1963), Maniac (1963) and Nightmare (1964).  The latter film is of particular interest as, unusually for the time, the apparently psychotic protagonist is a young woman (in most other films of this kind the deranged killer is invariably a seemingly ordinary young man, following a trend started by Anthony Perkins in Psycho).  Repulsion adopts the same quirk, with Catherine Deneuve, a rising star in French cinema, improbably cast in the role of a psychotic homicidal androphobe.   The previous year, the actress had achieved international stardom with her leading role in Jacques Demy's popular musical romance Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), although she had appeared in ten films before this, making her screen debut at the age of 12 in André Hunebelle's Les Collégiennes (1956).  Over the next few decades, the actress would feature in a staggering variety of film roles and by the mid-1970s she was already one of the most iconic figures in French cinema  - a status she enjoys to this day.  It was in Repulsion that Deneuve gave her first truly great performance, one that contributed hugely to her public perception as the ice maiden of art house cinema.

Like Polanski, Repulsion was Catherine Deneuve's first English language film outing and her obvious unfamiliarity with the language of Shakespeare works greatly to the film's advantage, adding to her character's sense of disconnection from the world around her through her tacit inability to connect with other people, both verbally or emotionally.  The actress's striking physical beauty and her natural air of schoolgirl innocence are exploited to the full by Polanski, making her manifestation as a totally unhinged killer in the film's final third (after an incredibly slow build-up) all the more stark and shocking.  One of the reasons why Repulsion is such an unsettling film is that the spectator is never given any opportunity to empathise with or understand the central protagonist.  Deneuve's cool, inexpressive performance gives nothing away and so her character, Carol, remains a worrying and frightening enigma throughout.  Right from the off, she comes across as alluring and sinister - in a way that is hard to pin down - and yet whilst she is clearly going through hell at no point are we inclined to sympathise with her.  The vacant expression that Deneuve carries on her perfect doll-like face for most of the film is one that chills the blood and gives little clue to what is behind the madness that is driving her to such astonishing bouts of hysteria and violence.

The horror of men

It is only right at the end of the film that the reason for Carol's destructive psychosis is given a possible explanation.  As the the camera slowly zooms in on an old family photograph we notice a young fair-haired girl who has her gaze coldly fixed on a middle-aged man (possibly her father) whilst every other person in the picture is smiling at the camera.  (Polanski shows us the same photograph much earlier in the film, but at that time its importance fails to register.)  The implication is that Carol is a victim of childhood sexual abuse and has grown up with a pathological revulsion for the male sex.  The escalating insanity she experiences in the course of the film is likely to be the result of a deep-seated emotional conflict that hits her as she is about to embark on her first romantic relationship, her normal biological urges totally at odds with an overriding disgust for sex that was driven into her psyche by the trauma of a childhood rape.  After killing her boyfriend once he has forced his way into her apartment, Carol's immediate thought is to barricade herself in her room to prevent any further invasion into her private space.  It is an act revelatory of the woman's reawakened terror of impregnation - an impression that is reinforced by the hallucinations in which she sees enormous cracks appearing in the walls of her apartment, symbolic of the splitting of her hymen.

It is at this point that the apartment ceases to be merely a living space or sanctuary.  It becomes a representation of Carol's inviolable inner self, a place she must protect at all costs from subsequent invasion.  The next man who forces his way in - her lecherous greedy landlord - she mechanically hacks to pieces with a cut-throat razor.  (It's almost an exact reversal of the famous shower scene in Psycho, with the photogenic blonde wielding the lethal blade against her male aggressor.  The frenzied editing and musical accompaniment make the comparison with Hitchcock's film unavoidable.)  It is a final climactic act that sends the young woman over the edge into insanity and catatonia.  In getting to this point, her apartment plays a crucial role, embodying all of her fears and neuroses, with imaginary invaders appearing out of nowhere to rape her in the night and hands terrifyingly springing from the walls (a reference to Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la bête) to grab and grope her.  As Carol's condition deteriorates, the space around her changes drastically until the apartment becomes virtually unrecognisable.  The walls seem to move outwards, widening the interior spaces as the objects contained within them appear to shrink.  The ceilings look as if they have descended, creating a crushing sense of claustrophobia that bizarrely conflicts with the inexplicably increased size of the rooms.

As the hallucinations become ever more wild and fantastic, the lighting becomes increasingly stark and threatening, with dark shadows crowding around Carol as if they mean to smother and devour her.  Sound is also used to great effect, both to stress the protagonist's feelings of social isolation and to heighten the tormenting impact of her manic episodes.  In the hallucination/dream sequences depicting assault and rape, we see Carol scream in abject terror but we hear nothing except the relentless ticking of a bedside clock.  Recurring drum rolls and cymbals accentuate the feelings of threat and violation, and the sense of continual intrusion is conveyed by loud noises emanating from outside the apartment, most annoyingly the sound of a bell being rung intermittently in a nearby convent school.  It is with the eerie impression of being lured against our will down an increasingly dark and twisting labyrinth that we accompany Carol on her one-way journey to hell.  The camerawork, lighting and editing are meticulous (vastly superior to what we find in Polanski's debut film) and maintain an ever-tightening mood of oppression as we watch the heroine fall apart in front of our eyes, driven mad by a fear that, once it has taken hold of her, grows like a turbo-charged cancer into a psychotic man-hating obsession that tears her mind and her identity to shreds.

The man who wasn't there

One of the most unsettling aspects of Repulsion is its weird mingling of the objective and subjective.  Throughout the film, Polanski goes to great pains to create an appreciable distance between the protagonist and the spectator (whilst keeping the camera lens as close to his lead actress as is physically possible for much of the film).  Because of her shy nature and poor command of English, Carol hardly ever gets to express her feelings and this creates an impenetrable barrier that prevents us from getting inside her head.  The form and scale of Carol's mental derangement are revealed to us not through Deneuve's (excellent) performance, which shows us nothing of her character's traumatised inner state as she reverts to childhood in her appearance and behaviour, but through the increasingly warped depiction of the exterior world she inhabits.  Carol's twisted persona is exposed in the first third of the film through the casually misogynistic behaviour of all the men she interacts with and the aggressively masculine nature of the world she lives in.  To the male sex, she is just a dumb blonde or a sex object.  Her boyfriend Colin treats her more courteously, but it is clear he wants to bed her as soon as he can, if only to gain credibility with his sickeningly chauvinistic drinking buddies.  No wonder Carol looks so vulnerable as she makes her way on foot across a grubby district of West London, resembling a solitary deer making its way through a tiger-infested forest.  The threat of assault by the predatory male is everywhere.

As the film progresses, the heroine's splintering psychology is revealed through a series of increasingly frightening hallucinations filmed in a progressively more expressionistic style.  In these sinister fugues, the lighting becomes more dramatic, the contrast heightened so that pure white and black dominate the image.  Meanwhile, the camerawork shows a progressive shift towards nightmarish fantasy with the use of wider lenses and shorter focal lengths distorting both Carol and the space she inhabits.  The camera roves freely, as if it were itself a separate character in the film, following the heroine for the most part, but occasionally straying away from her.  We have the ever-growing feeling that there is 'another presence' in the apartment when Carol is alone, and the use of the subjective camera bolsters this impression - most noticeably for the two murder scenes, but also on other occasions, such as the low-angle shot employed twice when Carol is seen at a distance in the bathroom.  The first shock moment in the film is the fleeting glimpse of a stranger in a wardrobe mirror.  The same mysterious figure returns on a number of occasions in Carol's dreams to violently rape her.

The subjective camerawork that Polanski uses sparingly but to great effect on Repulsion is perhaps the most expressive indicator of the heroine's worsening mental state, a pointer to her obsessional belief that there is constantly in her midst a hostile male presence.  As Carol's psychosis worsens, the unseen, obviously male intruder acquires an increasingly corporeal presence.  The two men she brutally murders are merely shadows of the fiend that haunts her constantly - the lingering spectre of the man who abused her and possibly raped her when she was a defenceless infant.  The camera lens becomes Carol's 'extra eye' through which she imagines she is being watched by her intangible stalker.  The metaphor of a 'split eye' implying a split identity was used by Luis Buñuel in the shocking opening to his silent short Un chien andalou (1929), in which a beautiful young woman allows her eye to be sliced open by a razor.  Repulsion directly references this gruesome spectacle in its opening titles, where the credits roll over a massive close-up of one of Catherine Deneuve's eyes.  The last credited name we see is that of Roman Polanski, which is the only one to move in a straight line across the screen, implicitly slicing the eye in two as it does so.

The strange attraction of Repulsion

In spite of its daring subject matter and highly original approach, Repulsion proved to be a notable commercial and critical success on its first release.  It received two important awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1965 (the FIPRESCI Prize and the Jury Special Prize) and further cemented Roman Polanski's reputation as an important director of the European 'new wave'.  Today, Repulsion is widely regarded as one of the finest British horror films ever made.  It also ranks as possibly cinema's most authentic and frightening depiction of one person's dramatic descent into madness.  The film is an avant-garde classic and sits well alongside Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), a similarly disturbing depiction of a personality meltdown.  It is blisteringly ironic that a film which appears to be so condemnatory of the exploitation of women was produced by a production company that earned the bulk of its revenue by doing just that - and directed by a man who would later become forever tainted with allegations of teen rape.

Even though Repulsion had gone massively over-budget, Compton's executives Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser were so impressed with the results Polanski achieved that they were glad to produce his next feature - the even weirder (albeit somewhat less well-regarded) black comedy Cul-de-sac (1966), which coincidentally starred Catherine Deneuve's older sister Françoise Dorléac alongside an actor destined to become an icon of the horror genre, Donald Pleasence.  The year after this, the director returned to the horror genre with a manic glee to deliver the best vampire spoof ever, The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967).  This was light relief before Polanski lunged into his second apartment nightmare, the creepy and wondrously unhinged Rosemary's Baby.

Film Synopsis

Carol and Helen Ledoux are two Belgian sisters who live in London and share a mansion apartment near to the South Kensington beauty parlour where Carol works as a manicurist.  A shy and repressed young woman, Carol resents the fact that her older sister is having an affair with a married man, Michael, and is strongly repulsed by the sight of his personal objects in her living space.  Despite her apparent lack of interest in sex Carol is extraordinarily good-looking and cannot help attracting male admirers.  She has started going out with a likeable young man named Colin, but a potential love affair appears to be frustrated by Carol's lukewarm response to her boyfriend's amorous overtures.  When Colin kisses her after driving her home, the young woman runs off to her flat in distress and frantically brushes her teeth as if to remove an unpleasant stain.  Carol becomes increasingly unstable in the days following her sister's departure for a 10-day holiday with her lover in Italy.  She becomes so wrapped up in herself that she doesn't notice a skinned rabbit rotting on a plate - meat that Helen had intended cooking a few days earlier.

A sign of Carol's worsening state is the onset of a bizarre series of hallucinations.  She sees large cracks in the walls of her apartment and then imagines she is being threatened by an unknown man, who violently attacks and rapes her in bed during the night.  So distracted is she at work that her employer has no choice but to send her home until she feels better.  One evening, Colin shows up at the flat unexpectedly, clearly concerned over his girlfriend's state of mind.  Mechanically, Carol bludgeons him to death with a candlestick and places the corpse in a bath filled with water.  As if only partly aware of what she has done, she cleans up the blood and barricades the entrance door to her flat.  The shock of this incident further aggravates Carol's condition and her hallucinations take on an increasingly fantastic form, the space around her becoming ever more strange and unreal.  She appears calmer, almost childlike, when her landlord shows up and forces his way into her home to collect the month's overdue rent.

Although the landlord is clearly shocked by the messy state of the apartment, his tone changes when he realises how desirable the young blonde is.  He offers to overlook the rent in future if she will only take of him.  Seemingly passive, Carol doesn't resist as the repugnant older man attempts to kiss her, but he recoils in alarm when she suddenly strikes him on the neck with Michael's cut-throat razor.  The young woman continues attacking her victim with the razor in a wild frenzy until he is dead.  After covering the bloody corpse with a settee, Carol succumbs to an even more terrifying series of hallucinations in which numerous hands burst from the walls of her apartment and try to grab hold of her.  She is in a catatonic state when Helen and Michael return from their holiday.  Whilst Helen is convulsed with shock by what she discovers in the untidy apartment, Michael seems to be pleased by what has happened to Carol.  A family photograph unseen among the wreckage offers a clue to Carol's apparently inexplicable behaviour.