For one of our final entries in the 31 Days of Hell series, Andrew reviews the 1981 film, Possession.
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| "Ummm..honey, you've got something on your face." |
Not every horror film is necessarily meant to simply
be a thriller designed to entertain audiences.
More often than not, the real aims of the writer-directors behind them
are therapeutic. David Cronenberg’s The Brood, for instance, was fueled by
his rage over his bitter divorce of his first wife. Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is said by its creator to have been healing for his
debilitating slump into depression. But
perhaps the most infamous, controversial and confounding case of directorial
catharsis has to be Polish auteur Andrzej Żuławski’s
1981 surreal shock drama, Possession. Starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, the
film concerns the marital disintegration of Mark, and international spy, and
his wife Anna.
Shot on location in
Berlin, Germany, the film opens on an anxious, hysterical note filled with
symbolic vistas of the still erect Berlin Wall dominating the title credits
sequence. After requesting a divorce
from Mark, Anna’s hysterics become increasingly bizarre, including but not
limited to self-mutilation. Suspecting
Anna of infidelity, Mark hires a private investigator to spy on Anna’s
whereabouts. What the investigator finds
out about Anna’s double life and who she in fact is seeing is the kind of
perversely bizarre inhuman manifestation that may have actually precluded
Japan’s Hentai tentacle-sex subgenre.
Often referred to by Sam Neill as his favorite work to
date as an actor, Andrzej Żuławski’s cathartic
expulsion of deeply seated anger at his ex-wife almost immediately incited an uproar
of scandal when it first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Much like Von Trier’s Antichrist, it is a tale of man and woman engaged in mortal combat,
with unfettered grief and rage spat at the camera as the couple’s rocky
marriage becomes increasingly violent. A
majority of Żuławski’s effect is achieved through his camerawork, which is
alive and all over the place with frenzied movement. Take for instance, a scene where Mark returns
home to find his son alone while Anna is off gallivanting. Enraged by Anna’s selfish and lackadaisical
behavior, he rocks back and forth furiously in his rocking chair as the camera
follows his every movement, his eyes wide with fevered hysteria. When Anna returns, both the rocking and
camera swaying seem to increase speed and vehemence.
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| "I never knew you were in to this kinda weird stuff. But, I'll just roll with it." |
Żuławski’s film doesn’t so much aim to
thrill or chill as it intends to realistically portray the painful feelings of
heartbreak and anguish emanating from a relationship in breakdown. Soon things get really bizarre when doppelgangers
begin appearing, Anna shows signs of possible demonic possession, and of
course, the inexplicable arrival of the creature. Predating both Antichrist and Silent Hill by
almost 20 years, some critics have taken visual effects artist Carlo Rambaldi’s
strange creature either literally or symbolic of Anna’s insatiable sexual
appetite. In the film’s most infamous
scene, which may have been part in parcel to Adjani’s win of the Best Actress
Award at Cannes, is a surreal subway miscarriage of screams, snarls, gyration
and vaginal excretion of blood and mess.
Due to scenes like this (and there are many), Possession was promptly banned in the UK as a ‘video
nasty’(recently lifted however) and in the US, the film was rescinded from Żuławski
and radically recut to resemble a standard horror thriller replete with a new
musical score.
While all of this sounds ripe for a juicy
exploitation film, this is not an easy viewing by any means nor should it
be. It is an anxious, sober, stressful
experience designed to push audiences so far out of their comfort zones that
you just want to shrivel up after viewing it.
Not since Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes
from a Marriage has a European director created a meditation on marital
woes this confrontational and harrowing.
Never one to take the easy route, Andrzej Żuławski is an underrated,
underappreciated maestro. From his
explicit photography drama The Important
Thing is to Love to his ill-fated Polish production On the Silver Globe, which was shut down by Polish ministry of
culture after perceiving anti-totalitarianism existing between the lines, Żuławski
seems destined to turn the filmgoing public on their heads and then some. Sadly, Żuławski and his first English
language opus Possession remain
largely unknown in the United States.
Although not all of Possession is
concrete, with multiple red herrings thrown in to derail the proceedings and
unresolved enigmas right up to the closing shots, there aren’t that many films
out there which capture the experience of marital disintegration in all of its
blood, torment and gnashing of teeth.
-Andrew Kotwicki