Repulsion

Roman Polanski, UK 1965, 104 minutes

In the 1960s Polanski, like a number of foreign directors, was drawn to the UK and the trendiness of the "Swinging London" scene. Repulsion was his first English language film and financed by Compton, an exploitation movie company that wanted to go arty/legit and saw the expatriate Pole, much acclaimed for Knife in the Water (1962) as the ideal and cheap(ish) way to do so.

Repulsion's plot is simple: Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian woman, lives in a London apartment with her older sister, Helen. Carol is a bit unhinged, with a revulsion to men and sex. Naturally, then, nice guy Colin's attempts to chat her up don't get very far. Helen, meanwhile, is carrying on with a married man, Michael (trivia buffs might care to note that Repulsion features the first orgasm ever heard in British cinema). Helen and Michael go off on holiday, leaving Carol alone in the flat. It doesn't take long for her to crack up completely...

Repulsion is one of those rare horror films which manages to transcend its genre ghetto to be a must see for the anyone with an interest in cinema generally. In this, and many other ways, it follows in the footsteps of Hitchcock's Psycho (also being shown - check it out on the big screen) and Powell's Peeping Tom. Like Hitchcock's film, Repulsion is a prime example of the cinema as shock machine: Everyday sounds - dripping taps, ticking clocks, and bells - resonate with menace. Phantom attackers suddenly appear. Walls split open, or have hands emerge from them. An intruder is slashed up with a straight razor. But, like Peeping Tom (with which it shares an opening shot of an eye, along with Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou) there's little mystery about what's going on. Instead, the emphasis is upon exploring the lead characters insanity. And here Repulsion, with its more straightforward plotting, is more believable than Powell's film.

Repulsion is perhaps Polanski's and Deneuve's finest hours. Polanski's direction is simply masterful. Here, he's a virtuoso who manages to avoid simply showing off. Near every shot is in there for a good reason. Progressively, we're taken deeper and deeper into Carol's psyche, as her apartment is rendered both her prison and the landscape of her mind. Deneuve is utterly convincing in her role. Largely mute, she accomplishes so much through gestures and looks.

"Polanski's most perfectly realised film... one of the most intelligent horror movies ever made." - Time Out

Review by Keith Brown
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97

Hailed by its producer as "the first commercial art film" Repulsion was Polanski's first English language movie and tells the story of a Belgian manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) who has a raging mental disorder hidden underneath her gorgeous, doll-like features.

Her problem is that she is simultaneously repulsed and attracted by men. Disturbed in her sleep by the loud moans of sexual ecstasy coming from the next room where her sister (Yvonne Furneaux) is having an affair with a salesman, her days are filled with silent apathetic brooding as she begins to experience hallucinations and slowly sinks into delirium.

Whereas previous films dealing with insanity have seen their protagonists through other people's eyes (Psycho for example), in Repulsion Polanski shows us Deneuve through her own world and so gives us probably the most vivid picture about what it's like being mad. And Deneuve excels in a role which has very little dialogue, conveying remarkably weil a kind of dreamy schizophrenia.

Polanski's flair for tension and mood is conspicuous here with affectionate shots of rotting rabbit and balletic razor-slashings. His visual eloquence is also very much to the fore, the phantasmagoria is excellent and extremely effective: walls turn to mud, a rapist hides under the bed sheets, hands appear out of the wall to grasp the protagonist's breasts, etc. Polanski remains too detached from his central character and explains nothing, but apart from that Repulsion is erotically sensational as well as intellectually fascinating.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96