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
