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Shocking, scary and shot on a shoestring budget, Roman Polanski's 1965 horror masterpiece provides a riveting account of a beautiful young woman's unstoppable descent into the madness that turns her into a killer. As someone who finds sex repulsive, she feels increasingly threatened by the regular attention she gets from admiring men whose unwanted advances, she regards as unpleasant, unwelcome and an invasion of her privacy. The discomfort and vulnerability that she feels manifest into something more serious, however, when during a period of enforced solitude, she starts to experience the series of terrifying hallucinations that eventually leave her completely unhinged.
Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) is a demure, young, Belgian woman who lives in a London flat with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) and works as a manicurist in an upmarket beauty salon where she attends to the needs of the establishment's well-off clientele. Her regular demeanor is so detached, distracted and distant that he colleagues and clients often ask if she's fallen asleep. During her walks back and forth to work, she seems to be in a trance and is strangely unresponsive whenever she encounters a decent young man named Colin (John Fraser) who regularly tries to date her.
Helen is having an affair with a married man named Michael (Ian Hendry) and his presence at the flat makes Carol uncomfortable and repulsed by his habit of leaving his toiletries in the bathroom, in places that she regards as an invasion of her space. When Helen and Michael leave for a holiday in Italy, Carol is left alone and in this state becomes even more withdrawn and agoraphobic. She starts to hear and see cracks appearing in the walls and suffers from frightening hallucinations during which she gets attacked and raped. She becomes so distracted that she lets the bathtub overflow, irons her clothes with an unplugged iron and constantly ignores Colin's attempts to contact her. When in his frustration, he breaks into the flat; Carol kills him by hitting him over the head with a candlestick.
Before she went on holiday, Helen had cooked a rabbit which had remained on a plate in the flat, gradually rotting and becoming a magnet for flies. In her distracted state, Carol remains totally unconcerned about the carcass and takes no action to dispose of it. When the landlord (Patrick Wymark) calls by to collect the rent money, he expresses his disgust at the state of the place which he refers to as a pigsty. As he becomes increasingly attracted to Carol, he makes some unwanted advances and suggestions which she responds to by repeatedly attacking him with a straight razor until he lies dead on the floor. When Helen returns from her holiday, she's naturally completely unprepared for the horrific scene that confronts her.
"Repulsion" is well-paced to make each successive stage of Carol's breakdown seem perfectly natural and its tense atmosphere is well complemented by Chico Hamilton's often neurotic-sounding score. Dialogue is used economically and some of the movie's most powerful passages feature none at all. Distorted images, extreme close-ups and the use of effects like arms coming out of the walls, all add to the sense of unease that permeates the whole film and its circular structure which begins with a close-up of Carol's blank-looking eye (as an adult) and ends with a chilling close-up of her eyes as a child, provides the movie with its satisfying and extremely thought-provoking conclusion.
From the acting standpoint, Catherine Deneuve virtually carries the entire film with an incredibly intense performance that's even more remarkable as this was one of her earliest movies.
After having watched "Repulsion", it's clear that Carol had been in a very troubled and abnormal mental state for many years. This being the case, it raises the question of why no-one had ever done anything to make sure that she got the help that she so obviously needed and leads to the likelihood that someone wouldn't have wanted the real cause of her psychosis to be known. Whether this is the case or not, it's an astonishingly good movie and was clearly years ahead of its time.
score 9/10
seymourblack-1 29 August 2018
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4310597/ |
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30-11-2019 08:33:56
