Monthly Archives: August 2019

  • Repulsion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roman Polanski (1965)

    Throughout the opening titles sequence of Repulsion, the soundtrack repeats a minatory two-note drumbeat and the camera shows in close-up a single eye.  Whereas most of the credits cross the screen at an angle (or, when there’s more than one name at a time, drift up and out of the frame), the last credit, ‘Directed by Roman Polanski’, moves in a dead straight line.  The four words intersect the image of the eye, calling to mind the notorious razor blade moment in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.  In what follows, Polanski will deploy other surrealist imagery and put a cut-throat razor to use – much less subliminally than the Buñuel one.  The bright right eye at the start belongs to the film’s protagonist Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve).  As things turn out, she’s not on the receiving end of the blade but is the person wielding it, though as a means of self-defence.  Carol continuously sees herself as a prospective victim.  Polanski’s psychological horror movie tells the story of her mental disintegration.

    Carol is a Belgian, working in contemporary London as a manicurist at a beauty salon, and sharing a rented flat with her elder sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux).  (The latter’s name, at least, is anglicised:  when she goes on holiday and sends Carol a postcard, it’s signed ‘Helen’.)  Polanski’s screenplay, written with Gérard Brach, doesn’t supply either of the Ledoux sisters with a backstory or an explanation of why they’ve moved to London.  The only evidence of their family history is a photograph on display in the flat – Carol and Helen, as girls, with their parents.  Helen is now having an affair with Michael (Ian Hendry), a married man.  Carol is very uncomfortable with his presence in the flat – his shaving things in the bathroom, Helen’s moans of pleasure when they’re making love in the next room.  But it’s when Michael takes Helen on holiday to Pisa and Carol is left alone that her androphobic mania goes into overdrive.

    Polanski builds up the ominous claustrophobia of the flat through a combination of sights and sounds, of details prosaic or disgusting – a dripping tap, raw meat that Carol takes from the fridge and leaves out to gather flies.  Terrified by footsteps passing in the corridor, she barricades the door with furniture but, in her nightmares, men (including Michael) still get into her room and bed.  Polanski disorients the audience effectively:  we’re sometimes unsure of what is real and what a figment of Carol’s paranoid imagination.  The most startling instance of this occurs when Carol kills Colin (John Fraser), the boyfriend she’s been increasingly anxious to avoid.  Puzzled and exasperated, Colin forces his way into the flat to find out what’s wrong.  While his back is turned, Carol knocks him out with a metal candlestick then beats him to death with it.  She runs a bath and hoists Colin’s corpse into it – a show of improbable physical strength that is part of why we doubt this is really happening.  The other reason for doubt is that Colin – John Fraser plays him sympathetically and credibly – doesn’t in the least deserve this fate.

    His death is a coup de théâtre all right and the growing realisation that it’s no fantasy intensifies our apprehension (in both senses of the word) of Carol’s state of mind.  Yet it hints too at the limitations of Repulsion.  Thanks in no small part to Gilbert Taylor’s black-and-white photography, this is a remarkable piece of film-making but it’s an indifferent (also in both senses of the word) piece of storytelling.  At the end of the titles sequence, when the camera pulls out to reveal her full face, Carol’s left eye is clouded and dark, and she’s distraite – in a fugue-like state – from the opening scene in the beauty parlour.  This is one of two men-free zones in Repulsion:  the other is a convent, its grounds visible from the window of the flat.  Carol occasionally watches the nuns there but her manner is so blank that she can hardly be said to do so wistfully, and she seems no more comfortable among women at her workplace than she is in the company of Michael or Colin.  The running commentary she gets from her beautician colleague Bridget (Helen Fraser) about the ups and downs of her own love life isn’t enough to explain Carol’s low spirits.  In an early sequence out on a street, she’s transfixed by a crack in the pavement – as if intuiting the cracks she’ll see opening in the walls of the flat when she descends into madness.  The film would have stronger dramatic shape if Carol initially showed some potential or longing for normality.

    It would be more potent too if the two homicides occurred the other way round.  The arrival at the flat of the Ledoux sisters’ landlord (Patrick Wymark), who’s after overdue rent, sets in motion one of the film’s two overlong scenes – a scene that’s also the crudest illustration of Repulsion‘s picture of men.  These range from a road-mender who greets Carol in the street with, ‘Hello, darlin’ – how about the other then?’; to Colin’s pub friends, John (James Villiers) and Reggie (Hugh Futcher), a misogynist double act; to breezily randy Michael.  Once the landlord has got his money, he comes on strong to Carol.  It’s when he’s forcing himself on her that she resorts to the cut-throat razor she’s taken the precaution of concealing in her hand.   The characterisation and playing of the landlord as a lecherous bully and creep are so overdone that you’re not sorry to see him taken out, even if the manner of his killing is gruesome to watch and listen to.  If Carol’s crazed violence led up to her slaying of Colin, that death would be even more shocking than it is.  In light of what she does to her hapless boyfriend, you almost feel it’s her duty to kill the obnoxious landlord.

    Polanski’s fascination with the look (and sound) of things turns out to pay richer dividends with inanimate objects than with people.  This was his first English language film, which may go some way to explaining why the performances, although variously striking, don’t seem orchestrated.  Only some way, though:  his preoccupation with image is a factor too.  The twenty-one-year-old Catherine Deneuve is an extraordinary camera subject.  For a while, her foreignness works as a potential explanation for Carol’s distracted quality.  We wonder if she feels alienated in a big new city (in a way that her older, more experienced sister evidently isn’t).  Polanski, although resident in France since shortly after he’d made Knife in the Water (1962) in Poland, was a newcomer to Britain too.  The scenes in London streets, shot largely from Carol’s point of view, may reflect something of the strangeness that he himself saw in them.  Yet Deneuve’s star beauty is too striking for the film’s good:  as Manny Farber noted at the time, her glamour stops her from blending in.

    It’s no coincidence that, on the few occasions that Polanski and Gilbert Taylor (somehow) manage to make Deneuve look more ordinary, Carol’s plight is more affecting – as it also is when Bridget tells Carol about a cinema visit with her boyfriend.  A Charlie Chaplin movie seems an unlikely choice for a young working couple in Swinging London but Helen Fraser recounts how Chaplin made her laugh (and does a little impression of him) very well.  It makes Carol laugh too.  She’s briefly connected to a more positive reality, until a Grand Guignol punchline intervenes.

    Deneuve’s conspicuous allure and unignorable presence are a particular problem if, as Polanski subsequently claimed (according to Adrian Martin on sensesofcinema.com, in 2001), Repulsion ‘is not primarily the study of a sexual pathology, but is about the way, in daily life, we often do not notice the signs that someone among us is in crisis’.  He no doubt means to make that point in the film’s last scene, when Helen and Michael return from Italy to discover a chamber of horrors.  A flock of other tenants in the building, surprisingly undisturbed by the noises and smells that must have been coming from Carol’s flat, now gathers to partake of the spectacle.  They utter concerned clichés but even here Polanski is so transfixed by the visual that the tenants’ comically unprepossessing faces obliterate their words and behaviour.  The same thing happens at the salon where Carol works:  its owner Madame Denise (Valerie Taylor) bitches amusingly about her ageing clientele but it’s the grotesque images of the latter undergoing ‘beauty’ treatments that dominate.

    Although the finale in the flat is the other overlong episode, its last moments work well.  Like the landlord, the garishly vile Reggie and John, whom Carol doesn’t even meet (in other words, male awfulness doesn’t depend on her perspective), vindicate her sexual disgust.  Michael, well played by Ian Hendry, is always a subtly different matter, though.  Helen finds Carol lying under a bed, not dead but catatonic.  Michael, ignoring the other tenants’ advice not to touch her until an ambulance arrives, picks up her body and carries it off, chivalrous but smiling.  His expression seems to justify Carol’s worst fears.  She can no longer resist him.  Readings of Sleeping Beauty as a rape fantasy naturally come to mind.

    The camera then moves to the mantelpiece in the living room of the flat, panning some kitschy ornaments and coming to rest on the Ledoux family photograph, on which it closes in.  The young Carol stands next to her father.  Alone among the figures in the group portrait, she’s unsmiling and apparently deep in thought.  Polanski seems to hint that sexual abuse by her father may be the source of Carol’s phobia; but a first touch of psychoanalysis as the film concludes feels like a joke.  Carol’s breakdown is not a case or character study but a purely cinematic phenomenon.

    16 August 2019

     

  • Varda by Agnès

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Agnès Varda (2019)

    Agnès Varda died in late March this year, aged ninety, a few weeks after this film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.  Her passing underlines, but doesn’t radically alter, the significance of Varda by Agnès:  this autobiographical documentary is a very conscious farewell.  Varda had been suffering from cancer; whether or not she was aware that her death was imminent, she clearly knew she’d made her last film.

    The eye disease from which she suffered was clearly becoming an increasing challenge, as illustrated in Faces Places, Varda’s 2017 collaboration with the photograffeur JR.  Under the opening titles of Varda by Agnès, the patterns of colour on the screen move in and out of focus, suggesting blurred vision.  At the close of the film, she recalls a memorable episode in Faces Places.  On a seashore rock formation, at low tide, JR posts a hugely enlarged image of Guy Bourdin, Varda’s friend and photographic model of more than half a century previously.   By the following morning, the sea has entirely effaced the photograph.  Varda says that she and JR considered ending Faces Places by vanishing into a near-sandstorm blown up by the coastal wind.  In the event, they didn’t but she decides to sign off in Varda by Agnès ‘disappearing in a blur’.  Her exit line is ‘Je vous quitte’ and the haze that fills the screen appears to spirit her away.  Although the fact of Varda’s death strengthens the metaphysical flavour of this finale, her leave-taking is also, more practically, an expression of a visual artist’s failing eyesight.

    The basic form of her swansong is simple enough although, characteristically for Varda, not as simple as it initially looks to be.  She sits on a stage, facing a large audience, and starts to talk to them and to camera about her life and work.  She asks for the first film clip to be shown on the large screen beside her.  We seem to be in for a straightforward illustrated lecture but none of the many subsequent clips is introduced in this explicit way.  The audience in the venue (an opera house converted to a cinema for the occasion, according to Varda) isn’t always the same one.  Early on, it seems largely to comprise aspiring film-makers, whom Varda addresses more directly than she does an older, more dressed-up assembly later in the film.  In other words, Varda by Agnès appears to splice different public performances that she’s given.

    Her narrative is remarkably fluent, even when it moves out of the theatre setting entirely.  Varda returns, for example, to the rural location of Vagabond (1985) to explain the disorienting intention of the right-to-left tracking shots she used repeatedly in that film and to talk with its star, Sandrine Bonnaire, who recalls – with good humour but without pulling punches – the gruelling things that Varda made her do.  Footage of interviews conducted with Varda at or closer to the time she made a particular film is inserted at several points.  Back in the theatre, there are a couple of onstage conversations – with the cinematographer Nurith Aviv, who shot some mid-period Varda films; and Hervé Chandès, director of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which has exhibited and acquired several of her installations and other artefacts.

    She looks and sometimes sounds tired but Varda is unfailingly lucid and cogent, whether she’s dealing with political history, film techniques or feelings about existence, mortality and people.  In sequences in the theatre, she occasionally looks down at notes but these are a prompt rather than a transcript.  She’s well prepared yet gives the impression of speaking off the cuff.  Even though she doesn’t work through her oeuvre in strict date sequence, she observes chronological order enough to convey the trajectory of her career.  The narrative finds time to cover her photography and, as implied by Hervé Chandès’ involvement, her work as an exhibition and installation artist.  I was pleased her documentaries got as much screen time as they do here.  While I’m not a fan of the few non-documentary Varda films I’ve seen, she’s so clear-minded and articulate that it’s well worth hearing what she was aiming to do in these too.  This applies even to a picture like One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) although it’s a relief that the excerpts illustrating the result are short.

    At the very start, Varda defines what have been her three priorities in cinema:  inspiration (why she makes a film), creation (how she makes it) and sharing (the necessary result of making it).  The shape and focus of what follows reflect these priorities, though never too emphatically.  Her most celebrated dramas, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Vagabond, incorporate documentary elements.  As she makes clear in Varda by Agnès, the same applies, vice versa, in her approach to documentary film-making.  (When I tried to key in ‘vice versa‘ in the notes I put on my phone after seeing the film, the predictive text insisted this should be ‘vice Varda’, which seems right enough.)  Addressing the audience of film students, Varda distinguishes two types of documentary – the ‘pure and brutal’ and the ‘filmic’.  The former type, she says, simply records reality.  The latter type, to which she’s firmly committed, presupposes a point of view that the film-making reflects – a kind of shaped, even staged reality.

    I’m usually left cold by the visual jokes of which Varda seems always to have been fond but these too are easy to tolerate in the context of this particular film – leavened as they sometimes are by a more substantial and self-deprecating humour.   She describes how she intended to film her childhood home in Belgium.  The house she grew up in now belonged to a couple of model railway fanatics – or ‘trainopaths’, as the husband calls himself and his wife.  They laugh about their obsession without in the least apologising for it.  In each of The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Faces Places (the three documentaries by her that I’ve so far seen), Varda consistently features people whom she finds extraordinary and appealing.  It’s typical of her that her fascination with the trainopaths resulted, as she acknowledges, in their completely upstaging her return-to-childhood reflections.

    At 115 minutes, Varda by Agnès isn’t short (and doesn’t feel it) but fair enough:  it’s the story of an extraordinary and extraordinarily long career.  It’s full of things that hadn’t occurred to me, like how the advent of digital cameras has allowed those interviewed by documentary film-makers to feel a greater sense of privacy (though Varda doesn’t go on to admit that, once the result is ‘shared’, this turns out to be an illusion of privacy).  And there are good jokes, when they’re not too preconceived.  Varda stops herself a syllable into a parapraxis:  meaning to say ‘the chronology of my films’, she starts to say ‘the criminology’.  Quickly realising this is a Freudian slip not to be wasted, she decides to make clear what she nearly said by mistake.  Uttering all five syllables, she gets the full audience reaction benefit.  A more confounding joke – and it’s hard to think this wasn’t in Varda’s mind – is that by making this bracing autobiography and dying before it opened in cinemas, she has effectively thwarted any other film director with ideas about devising a posthumous tribute to her.  This is called what’s having the last word.

    15 August 2019

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