Rotten Tomatoes
Usually misattributed to the horror genre, this challenging and
highly unusual drama stars Isabelle Adjani as a young woman who forsakes
her husband (Sam Neill) and her lover (Heinz Bennent) for a bizarre,
tentacled creature that she keeps in a run-down Berlin apartment. In the
beginning, her husband knows nothing about the monster and sincerely
believes that his wife is insane. He has her tailed by private
detectives, whom she kills and feeds to the creature. Still unaware of
what has happened,
the husband contends
with the reserved and inadvertently seductive presence of his wife's
look-alike (also played by Adjani), a schoolteacher who frequently comes
to tutor his son while his wife is away. Though tempted by her quiet
goodness and beauty, he is still passionately in love with his wife and
even after he finds out about the murders, he stays by her side and
helps her conceal her crimes. Filmed amidst the oppressive backdrop of
the Berlin Wall by the expatriate Polish director Andrzej Zulawski (who
was unable to work in his homeland after too many clashes with the
authorities), the picture is so relentlessly intense and so deliberately
esoteric, that most viewers would find it too hard to connect with.
Still its symbolism, its unbridled and flashy directorial style, and the
tour de force performance by Isabelle Adjani earned this unique tale a
cult following in Europe. The version originally released in the U.S.
had 45 minutes chopped out; in this form, it is barely comprehensible
and looks like a cheap, gory feast. ~ Yuri German, Rovi
FilmWalrus
Review of Possession (1981)
Sometimes it can be quite difficult to review a film that is very close
to your heart. One must try and separate the nostalgia from the
contemporary appeal and the personal reaction from the critical
analysis. With “Possession” (1981) it is doubly hard, as the film is
aggressively inaccessible physically (the director’s cut Anchor Bay DVD
is out of print and relatively rare) and intellectually (“challenging”
doesn’t begin to describe it). Perhaps I should start out by saying that
few viewers will react to the film as favorably as I (although Mad Dog
and my oldest sister share the fervor) and many will find it alienating,
disturbing, uncomfortable and interminable. These reactions are quite
natural and not many casual film fans will see how brilliantly these
reactions (amongst others) are constructed.
My goal with this
essay is to give a review of the film along with an in-depth critical
reading centered upon the themes of marital division and sexual
confusion. Since this paper is meant to be readable by both those who
have never seen the film and those who have had the honor, I will keep
the spoilers to a minimum.
What exactly is “Possession?” It’s an
art-film/drama/horror hybrid from Polish exile director Andrzej Zulawski
made in West Berlin in 1981. It stars Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani.
Adjani was in a career slump due to a reputation as ‘difficult to work
with,’ but “Possession” earned her a surprise Cesar (French Oscar) and
the top acting prize at Cannes. By the decade’s end she’d have three
more Cesars. Watching her committed performance, far outside the
boundaries of where most actors dare to venture, it is not hard to see
why this was a turning-point in her career.
A plot summary is necessary, yet I don’t want to give certain key
elements away. While not necessarily a twist-type movie, there is
nothing quite like the shock of seeing “Possession” without knowing the
full story.
Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) are a
married couple already on the brink of divorce as the film begins. Mark
returns home after a mysterious trip abroad (we see him being paid with a
suitcase of cash by a government organization) only to discover that in
his absence, Anna has been conducting an affair. Anna’s friend Margie
has been taking care of their son, Bob, but refuses to tell Mark the
name or address of the interloper. After several marital fights Mark
eventually discovers that an obnoxious ‘guru’ named Heinrich is the
secret lover and the two have a confrontation. In a secondary subplot,
Mark is also astonished to discover that Bob’s teacher, Helen (also
played by Adjani), looks identical to his wife. Soon, Anna disappears
again and this time even Heinrich doesn’t know where she’s gone. Mark
hires a detective to find her and the terrible truth is gradually
revealed.
What is missing from any cursory description is the spirit that makes
both the drama and horror of this film so evocative. On the drama side,
Mark and Anna’s split is represented on a mind-boggling number of
layers. Most overtly is the white hot intensity of the acting, delivered
almost entirely in screams and gestures that tear through the actors’
entire body. On a scale from 1 to 10 in acting pitch (not quality), with
“Pickpocket” (1959) as a 1, “Goodfellas” (1990) as a 10 and “
Lust for Life” (1956) as an 11, then “Possession” rates a 26.
Mark and Anna are shouting at each other by the opening five minutes.
After the opening ten they are fighting in public. Within half an hour
they are physically beating each other with unrestrained ferocity. The
level of frustration, rage and insanity only continues to rise. Zulawski
expertly selects props (blanket, electric knife, meat grinder) and
actions to augment the performances and add to the anxiety during their
sparring matches.
In one surreal sequence we see Anna arguing vehemently while stuffing
laundry into the refrigerator. The capstone example is a flashback scene
with Adjani alone in a subway station carrying groceries. She delivers a
performance packed with unrivaled intensity and bravery (dwarfing even
Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet” (1986)) as the consequences of her
unhappy marriage overtake her. She undergoes what at first appears to be
a seizure, shattering her groceries against the wall and jerking about
as though possessed (hence one meaning of the title) in a single,
tortuous long take.
Most of the fights occur in the apartment shared by the family. The
camera places us uncomfortably amidst these battles, in the
hyper-awkward situation of a third-person in the room who desperately
wants to escape the presence of such seething fury. Few films save Mike
Nichol’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), Ingmar Bergman’s
“Scenes from a Marriage” (1973) or perhaps the films of John Cassavetes
have ever depicted such uncomfortable scenes of mutual, inescapable
torment.
The tension and electricity of the performances
is literally inhuman, and it becomes quickly obvious that we are not
really watching ‘realistic’ acting, but something far more extreme. Yet
despite the excesses on display the camera records the events with
unflinching and unflattering coldness. The tone is deadpan serious. This
had the added advantage of bolstering its cult appeal and allowing
interpretations ranging from artistic enjoyment of the authenticity and
audacity to amused marvel at the hyperbole. To quote Mad Dog,
“Possession is seriously one of the only movies I like genuinely as much
as I like it ironically.”
[Image:
Neill delivers one of the film’s most impossibly sincere lines: “You
know what this is for… THE LIES!” before slapping Adjani]
Before
ending my discussion of the performances, I must mention the
brilliantly, outrageous Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) who plays Adjani’s
self-possessed second lover. The director designed him based on every
quality he disliked, and Bennent comically recalls every egotistical
male who believes he’s reach the pinnacle of sophistication and sex
appeal through his own recipe of mysticism, training, drugs and fashion.
He makes a sharp third point in the love triangle; his ability to stir
hatred a perfect compliment to the couple who never run out of anger to
vent.
In terms of style and themes, Zulawski does an excellent job showing
the destruction of a relationship through the breakdown of
communication. The characters are isolated, inarticulate and unable to
make contact with each other either physically (in person, by phone,
through others) or emotionally. The marital breakdown is externalized,
too, within the setting. Zulawski camera often lingers on the foreboding
Berlin Wall, ever present outside the windows. However, whether
Zulawski intends the fractured marriage to be a metaphor for the
Germany’s political divide or vice versa, remains debatable.
Further,
Bruno Nyttan’s cinematography balances the many apartment-bound scenes
with a paradoxical combination of division and claustrophobia, often
isolating the rival spouses with a shallow depth of field. A crisp
close-up on one lead is thematically composed with the other in a
deep-staged out-of-focus position. The characters seem to inhabit planes
of their own, often further sub-framed apart by doors and other strong
verticals (see also the mirror-lined café corner in the second
screenshot).
In the film’s latter half, the terrible aftermath of the marital discord earns a final, horrifically potent symbol.
With
little space to move around and often little more than bare walls to
use as background, Zulawski still endows each set with a unique
ambience. The native hues and contrasting palettes of the family’s
blue-tinted apartment and Anna’s private yellow apartment creates
unsettling atmospheres and oppositions. The director uses his minimalist
locales to good effect, but goes beyond the existential emptiness so
easily and frequently employed by filmmakers critical of modernity’s
sterility. His compositions sustain fear, estrangement, tension and
madness with equal adroitness.
For a two-hour Polish art-film about the dissolution of marriage,
Zulawski manages an impressive visual dynamism. The camera is constantly
moving, although often in unexpected ways. In one transitional shot the
camera dollies right to follow Anna as she enters her apartment, but
rather than follow her in or cut inside, the director reverses the
motion and dollies back to the empty car she arrived in for no apparent
narrative purpose. Another scene involves an elliptically rotating crane
shot on a hemispherical spiral staircase.
The cuts are nearly exclusively hard and conspicuous, making use of
high contrast and unexpected changes in location. Rarely is movement
given a clean entrance or clean exit, so the viewer feels forever thrown
into the action as it happens and without closure.
The
actors are also on the move and not just with the expressive
gesticulations mentioned earlier. The staging and blocking shows
remarkable finesse, such as one memorable scene in which Anna arrives
home to find Mark rocking back and forth in a chair. As they begin to
fight, the wide-angle lens exacerbates Mark’s swinging sensation towards
and away from the camera. The focus puller struggles to keep up. Again,
the audience feels the uncomfortable proximity to the private
bickering.
Another example of conspicuous staging is a version of what Giallo Fever lovingly calls “
the ‘Tenebre’ shot”
after the 1982 giallo that uses it so effectively (although it is not
the originator). In such a shot, a character in the foreground moves
aside to reveal another character behind them, commonly used to get a
quick shock/distress reaction as we realize the killer is about to
strike.
Near the end of “Possession” there is a scene
where the two leads have sex on the kitchen floor, exchange whispered
ravings and then plan a desperate course. The ‘reveal’ occurs after Anna
has briefly blocked the door to pick up her purse. Rather than a
killer, we see their child, Bob. We still have the shock/distress effect
but the reason is more psychologically nuanced. The irresponsibility of
the characters’ behavior dawns upon the audience anew. We realize that
Bob’s trauma at the hands of these parents (who conduct themselves far
outside the limits of social norms or mental sanity) is probably worse
than witnessing the primal scene.
In
fact, much of the film deviates from conventional depictions and
readings of sex and sexuality. Heinrich, for instance, has an unusual
relationship with his live-in mother and mentions at one point that he
has a previous family that he left behind somewhere. Included in
Heinrich’s personal mysticism is a strange pre-occupation with his body.
He almost always has his shirts open to reveal his chest and runs his
hands over himself as he moves about in a manner reminiscent of bad
interpretive dance.
One can read Heinrich as a man more in love
with himself than the women who serve as conquests; food for his ego.
His fluid, bizarre staging (at one point spinning down a staircase with
his hand above his head) and sexualized self-love combine briefly with
the set design of his own apartment in the scene where Mark fights
Heinrich: In the screenshot below, Heinrich is about to kick Mark in the
head. Note the strange graphic match with the photo on Heinrich’s wall,
neatly referencing his narcissism and obsession with his body.
Heinrich’s sexual confusion is fully matched by Anna and Mark, who have
numerous issues of their own. Anna’s migration from Mark to Heinrich
and beyond shows a search for sexual and emotional fulfillment (which
she also explicitly states at one point) while Mark’s involvement with
Anna’s look-alike, Helen, begins to weaken his grip on his relationships
and reality.
[Image: Helen, played by Adjani now with green eyes and brown hair]
Like
the theme of split relationships, the issue of sexual confusion is not
just manifested in the content of the “Possession,” but the form as
well. Throughout the first half of the film an atmosphere of tension
(sexual and otherwise) pervades the slower moments. At these times,
intensity still glows in the eyes of the actors, but no violent physical
events provide an outlet for the energy. Deprived of any solid idea on
where the film is heading, there is a certain fear that almost any
violation of acceptable norms and behaviors might occur on a moments
notice. One visual motif that plays upon such tension is an
uncomfortable wide-angle arrangement with a character (visible in the
background) gripping a naked torso in the foreground.
[Images: How do we read these shots? The backs we see belong to Bob, Anna and Mark (from top to bottom).]
We see this shot three times:
1) When Mark finds his son covered in fifth and takes off his shirt to clean him.
2) During a rare moment of marital calm as Mark puts his naked wife to bed (but does not have sex).
3) Before Mark and Anna have sex on the kitchen floor.
The
composition seems both sexual and possessive (possibly even violent)
although the context is very different. The repetition of such an
unusual camera shot in situations that are difficult to read and harder
to predict induces anxiety and ambiguity in the audience as they try to
assess the meaning and motivation in the gaze and grip of the
characters. In each case there is a loaded anticipation/fear as we await
what will happen next. Further complicating our understanding of these
moments is the loss of gender specificity from the cropped rear view of
the foreground figures.
The audio work also instigates a
systematic ambiguity; here between sexual pleasure and pain, a dichotomy
that epitomizes the couple’s attraction/repulsion issues. Pleasure and
pain is linked through the frequent auditory motif of moaning. In one of
the first instances we discover Anna is a ballet instructor and witness
her strictly teaching a group of young girls. Anna ruthlessly grips one
girl’s outstretched thigh and holds it in place for an uncomfortable
period as the child emits choked cries. The combination of the physical
contact between the two women, the extreme close-up and the rising moans
makes the shot feel strangely pornographic.
During the subway scene that follows shortly after, Anna makes rhythmic
cries that are difficult to read until the conclusion of the scene. In
the climactic example, Mark heads towards the sound of grunts in an
unknown house and walks in on his wife having sex, but whether her cries
refer to pleasure or pain is still ambiguous. The final shot of Mark
and Anna together involves Anna emitting a cry while on top of Mark that
seems to quite explicitly combine the pleasure/pain dichotomy. This
constant play with our interpretation of sound, places us within the
system of sexual confusion central to “Possession.”
The music is
composed by Andrzej Korzynski and goes a long way towards establishing
the proper mood of tension and alienation. Certain pieces return to
accent key moments or punctuate the dialogue, though usually with a
subtlety not found in the rest of the film. The music never bridges the
hard cuts (which might have served to ‘heal the cut’ so to speak), but
rather kicks in simultaneously with the new shot to throw us that much
more off balance. The combination of music and sound in the disturbing,
uncertain finale elicits an intellectual query (we aren’t quite sure
what is going on) as much as an emotional response.
Finally,
I want to put a shout-out to the special effects designed by Carlo
Rambaldi. According the DVD commentary he worked with almost no time or
money, but his stunning results are impossible ignore. Interestingly,
Rambaldi has a direct connection to my precious Italian horror. He did
special effects for less than 25 films, but managed to work on personal
favorite giallos by the three great Italian horror masters: Mario Bava
on “Twitch of the Death Nerve” (1971), Lucio Fulci on “
A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin”
(1971) and Dario Argento on “Deep Red” (1975). Rambaldi also did the
effects for “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982), providing one of two
direct links to Stephen Spielberg (the other being Sam Neill via
“Jurassic Park” (1993)).
[Image: A final-act pink sock… now it all makes sense!]
