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I’ve always had mixed feelings about Roman Polanski. And I’m talking strictly about his work. If you want an opinion about his personal life, go read Jezebel. Polanski is responsible for 1 of the movies that is on my personal top 5 movies of all-time list: Chinatown. And yet, he also made Knife in the Water, a movie that is on my personal top 5 movies that seem over-hyped that I totally don’t get. And I was a little deceived by Repulsion. Catherine Deneuve is in it, so I figured it was French, and y’all know by now how I feel about French movies. Because of this, it’s been on my list of movies I’ve wanted to watch for a long time. So, I was home alone this weekend, Eric is away, it’s a lonely Sunday afternoon, I just drank an entire pot of coffee by myself, what the heck, let’s watch Repulsion.
Deneuve plays Carol, a young Belgian girl living in London. Wait—London? They’re speaking English? WTF? Doesn’t Polanski live in Paris? Ok—thank you Wikipedia for proving that I’m a big dumb idiot. Repulsion was made in 1965—before he was even married to Sharon Tate and WAY before he made the mistake of going to that party at Jack Nicholson’s house. So it’s not French, and I’m not going to be able to expound all sorts of theories about connections between Carol’s extreme prudishness and Polanski’s exile from the U.S.
With that out of the way, I settled in and watched the film. Carol’s got probs. Big probs. She glides through life often getting distracted, often staring into space. When we first see her she is at her job at a beauty salon, staring at the hand of the wealthy old woman she is supposed to be performing a manicure for. “Are you asleep?” the woman asks and Carol smiles and tries to recover. Carol moves through the streets of London like a sleepwalker. Colin, played by John Fraser, is a potential suitor who pursues Carol despite her disinterest and ambivalence.
She lives with her sister Helen who is having an affair with Michael, a married man. Carol lies awake at night listening to them have relations. Michael puts his razor in Carol’s toothbrush cup, which is enough to drive any young girl bonkers, but there are hints that there is more going on behind Carol’s blank eyes. All heck breaks loose when Helen and Michael leave for a trip to Italy and Carol is left alone in the apartment they share. It becomes clear that some bad stuff happened to Carol in her past, and she has nightmares that bleed into her reality. Carol starts deteriorating fast, and I won’t give too much away, but things don’t go well.
Repulsion is the first in Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy”, a horror series to be followed by Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. It is his first English language film and second feature length film after the afore-mentioned Knife in the Water. The apartment Carol and Helen share is almost a character, as it becomes both a sanctuary and a prison for Carol as she relives the horror of her childhood using weapons. Sound and noise also are characters in this film, whether it is the street noise of London as she walks the sidewalks, the constant ticking of the clock in the apartment, or the clanging of the bells from the convent next door.
Repulsion is one of those great black and white movies from the 1960s that is a little slow, but gives you tons to think about. Polanski doesn’t give you a lot of plot, but loads of images and sounds and even smells to let your mind fill in the blanks. When Carol takes the skinned rabbit that her sister was going to cook for dinner but didn’t out of the refrigerator, you are repulsed. She leaves it on the coffee table and you know it’s there, you hear the flies buzzing even though you don’t always see it, and you can smell it, I swear you can. It’s rather remarkable. He never tells us why Carol is the way she is, but he gives us clues, from the way Carol reacts to Michael, to an old family photograph.
Halfway through watching Repulsion this weekend, I started to wonder if maybe I picked the wrong weekend to watch this movie: I’m home alone, there is a lot of ambient noise at our house, I haven’t spoken to anyone but the dog for days.
Time for the Repulsion You’ve Been Home Alone Too Long Test:
- Skinned rabbit carcass in a plastic baggie hidden behind the toaster oven? Check
- Ironing a dress without plugging in the iron? Check
- Staring blankly at the cracks in my plaster walls until it seems like they are getting bigger? Check
- Hammering a board across the door so no one can get in? Check
Ok, time to go back to work. When’s Eric coming home?
