Saturday Night Cinema: Repulsion (1965)

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema masterpiece is Roman Polanski's psychological thriller Repulsion. Forgive the Korean subtitles, but it was the only online version I could find. Polanski is, of course, a brilliant and singular talent, and I am a huge fan of his work. His early films are particularly painful, disturbing, and haunting. Repulsion was his first English-language film. It is a "most perfectly realised film, a stunning portrait. "A peerless Freudian nightmare, frequently revisited but seldom matched
in its desire and terror, its visual-aural flow, and its queasy
voyeuristic pleasure in seeing a frosty princess picking at her own skin." 

As psychological horror films go, there are more than a few that get
the psychology better than this, but almost none that come within
spitting distance of the horror.

The exquistely beautiful Catherine Deneuve is astonishing as an isolated, sexually repressed woman woman's descent into madness.

Repulsion (1965)

By Bosley Crowther

Published: October 4, 1965

An absolute knockout of a movie in the psychological horror line
has been accomplished by Roman Polanski in his first English-language
film. It is the British-made, French-played Repulsion and it opened here
Saturday.

Prepare yourself to be demolished when you go to see it—and go you
must, because it's one of those films everybody will soon be buzzing
about. It's the David and Lisa—only better—of this newspaper strike. To
miss it would be worse than missing Psycho, if you've a taste for this
sort of thing.

For it is more than just a tale of mounting horrors that moves its
heroine—a beautiful, sex-repressed French girl living in London—from a
state of mental woe into a stage of dithering madness and then to the
dark extremity of murdering a brace of fellows who happen into the
lonely apartment in which she is hidden.

It is also a haunting adumbration of a small but piercing human
tragedy, and it is almost a perfect specimen of a very special
cinema-sound technique.

Mr. Polanski, you'll remember, is the young director who made the
Polish film Knife in the Water. In that one, he proved his ability to
penetrate and expose the alien and angry impulses of the subconscious
mind. Here he goes even further into the dank and murky chambers of the
brain to discover the hideous demons that sometimes take possession
there.

The brain of which the demons take possession in this progressively
more horrendous film is that of a young manicurist, played by Catherine
Deneuve, the slim girl whose radiant blond beauty is crucial, for the
weird and agitating mystery here is why a girl of such fascinating
beauty should be as hostile as she is toward men.

Creepingly, Mr. Polanski exposes this mystery by showing us first
the tortured nature of his heroine—how she holds off an ardent young
suitor, how she fiercely resents and hates the lustful lover of her
older sister with whom she shares a London flat; and then he continues
the exposure with a detailed and gruesome account of the crumbling of
her mind while she is staying in the apartment alone and how she
murders, first, her innocent suitor and then the lecherous landlord when
they unwittingly invade the fetid place.

But the final, poignant revelation is in an old family photograph,
which shows the two sisters when they were children, that is picked up
by the camera at the end.

This subtlety is characteristic of the structure and realization
throughout. Mr. Polanski builds a towering drama with a skillful mesh of
incidental stimuli. The dressed carcass of a rabbit on a platter
becomes a monstrous symbol as the picture goes along. Small cracks in
the walls of the apartment flow into crunching indicators of the
heroine's crumbling mind.

Distortions in the rooms of the apartment tacitly reveal her mental
state. Phantom arms that punch through the walls and seize her
visualize her nightmare insanity.

And with sound, too, Mr. Polanski weaves a fabric of tremendous effects.

Miss Deneuve is simply splendid in the central role—secretive in
nursing her obsession, and starkly sad in her insanity. Yvonne Furneaux,
who played the mistress of the hero in La Dolce Vita, also does a
splendid job as the subtly contentious older sister, and Ian Hendry is
properly crude as the latter's lover. Patrick Wymark plays the landlord
vulgarly, and John Fraser is sugary as the suitor who is rewarded with a
clout on the head.

Within the maelstrom of violence and horror in this film, Mr.
Polanski has achieved a haunting concept of the pain and pathos of the
mentally deranged. He has delivered undoubtedly one of the best films of
the year.

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Nicola Timmerman

10 years ago

I usually love your choice of films, but I found this movie truly repulsive. Like the movie Belle de Jour avec Catherine Deneuve, it goes places I don’t want to go. Enough horror, masochism and sadism in the world as it is.
Didn’t Polanski also sleep with some underage girl, or am I confusing him with someone else.

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Watch Walid Shoebat re: Islam

10 years ago

Yes–Polanski gave her qualudes and alcohol. She was 12 or 13. Like the Islamic supremacists, he excused it then and now. I have no use for Polanski or Woody Allen, regardless of their talent.

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Peter Mattei

10 years ago

Sadly, this copy is polluted with commercials also.

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KLKL

10 years ago

the good news is that as violent jihad of the like we have just seen in Kenya and “Pakistan” continue and the goals of the stealth jihad become more apparent more and more people are waking up to the danger of Islam to Western Civilization unfortunately our so-called “leaders” are not among them…not yet anyways

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bb

10 years ago

I only got to see the first hour of the movie at this link and I can’t find the rest of it anywhere else. It seems like an interesting movie so far. It seems strange that you can’t find the rest of it anywhere, almost like it is being hidden for some reason. Rosemary’s Baby is another good Polanski movie. I think he lets out a lot of secrets in his movies. It seems like the girl in this movie is becoming possessed. I noticed her staring at an old lady’s ring in the beginning. It is like she is subcoming to the evil around her with no stability in her life.
The people around her seem nice enough, but they are all kind of twisted in a way. Maybe this is what happens to people who aren’t bold enough to face the world for what it is. They turn into murderers. I notice a lot of Muslims/Arabs seem to be very sensitive souls also. I wonder if that combined with lawlessness leads them to kill.

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bb

10 years ago

Polanski did seduce a girl he was photographing, and she has since forgiven him. He is now welcomed in France and is hiding out there. They blamed it on a European perspectives, since he grew up in Poland. I think it was strange for the mother to let this girl go be alone in a house with him in order for him to take modeling shots. Maybe it was like a set up in a way. When they murdered his wife and unborn child, there was satanic stuff written on the walls. Maybe satanists put a spell on him to fall into temptation when the circumstances allowed it.
I wish he would apologize if he hasn’t. I think it would help people to feel less repulsed by his movies, which are really good.

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bb

10 years ago

http://viooz.co/movies/1749-repulsion-1965.html
Here is a better thing if you want to see the whole thing without subtitles.

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bb

10 years ago

*better link

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FritzIdler

10 years ago

Managed to watch it all the way through last night, but it wasn’t easy. There were commercials about every five minutes, except with no sound. Which I found amusing. And then no second half. Until I clicked on “jsyoon1289” at the bottom. I recall having to click on something else once there, but I did find it. For those interested, I’ll check right now. Of course. I typed “Repulsion” into the search box. The site is called Dailymotion. Which I now finally notice is displayed right on screen here! I have to say, it was one of my most interesting online movie watching experiences. A French girl living in London filmed in English by a Polish speaking man with Korean subtitles. Perhaps munching on freshly made popcorn, and drinking lots of beer was a help. The movie itself was better than expected. I liked it. Maybe I’ll send for Knife In The Water from Netflix. But then again, maybe not. Polanski still brags about defiling girls younger than 12, and no one in Europe thinks it’s a big deal. Fortunately, after waking up kind of groggy for some reason, my morning walk put me in a great mood. It usually does.

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TC

10 years ago

really kind of surprised to see a plug for Polanski on here. Euro perspective my butt. The guy was a child predator and took the option of fleeing justice. If the girl forgave him as an adult, that is her decision, but it doesn’t make Polanski any better.

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