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Director: Andrzej Żuławski
Screenplay: Andrzej Żuławski and Frederic
Tuten
Cast: Isabelle Adjani (as
Anna/Helen); Sam Neill (as Mark); Margit Carstensen (as Margit Gluckmeister);
Heinz Bennent (as Heinrich); Johanna Hofer (as Heinrich's mother)
Synopsis: Returning home from an espionage mission, Mark (Neill) discovers that his wife Anna (Adjani) has had an affair. Their
marriage starts to break down immediately after, but rather than with her Zen-like,
New Age lover Heinrich (Bennent), Anna
is occupying an isolated room with an entity scrapped from the bowels of the
subconscious. In a narrative that includes spies, body horror and internal
turmoil set in the closed-in walls of West Germany, Żuławski's response to Ingmar
Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage
(1973) is as overwhelming experience. |
| From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2pkRJqkCabc/UffTcXCYLwI /AAAAAAAAAtU/7Aj_bUrjjMg/s1600/Possession2.png |
From the first ten minutes
onwards, this is proven as Possession
in tone is drastically different from many a film. A heightened intensity is
here that is far and away more pronounced that many other films I've covered on
the blog. The acting is made to be at a vastly intense level than usually seen,
as is common in other Żuławski films,
not necessarily theatrical but feral, basic emotions taken to their fullest. A
scream is prolonged and stretched longer, as is a state of shock made to look
catatonic. Adjani's performance is
legendary, spasming and wailing when she's not struggling to keep herself
together, culminating in a freak-out in a subway corridor where she is almost
possessed demonically, but Sam Neill
is just as startling. A man more well known for films like Jurassic Park (1993), his character soon into the film, even before
Adjani's Anna, is losing his sanity from
the prospect of losing his wife to another person. The actual separation is
equivalent to a drug withdrawal, twisting in the foetal position on a sweat
drenched and bared bed, and how Neill used a rocking chair onscreen is as if
he's able to defy gravity, rocking with the intensity in his eyes of someone
lost in another reality. The performances in general from all the actors are
just as intense, and the leads are exceptional, but this film does as well
prove that any actor can give a truly full bodied performance, willing to go
the extra distance for the sake of the intensity required. You see such a
drastic difference in something like this in contrast to a lesser film like Neill's Sirens (1993) from what was required from him.
Experiencing Possession is an entirely different prospect than a lot of films. In
the cusp of many genres and in an entirely new one of its own, many parts of
the film tip over into the ludicrous when it's not being intentionally humorous
in a blackened way, but there's always something to crawl under your skin to
counteract this. Written during a severe breakup with his first wife, Żuławski's film feels too focused, too
real at points for it to trivialise its marital breakup narrative when Anna's
lover turns out to be a humanoid squid monster designed by Carlo Rambaldi. The film is too dynamic, too rich in details for
that sentence to reveal too much, the pain depicted too real and said monstrosity
taking the form of a repressed emotion in all its slimy, visceral birthing.
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| From http://www.mondo-vision.com/images/photos/possession5lg.png |
Technical
Details:
Adding to all of this is a
prowling, continually moving camera that will yet stay still and focus on an
important emotional moment long enough for it to be fully felt. Cinematographer
Bruno Nuytten should be as praised
for what he does in his role, bringing this elastic camera work that follows
the performers onscreen with the same level of intensity as they are depict in
front of it. The music by Andrzej
Korzyński is just as evocative, providing a similar intensity with each
electric wash of the synthesizer heard, never overbearing or drowning out the
actors' performances but adding to them.
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| From https://doctorinsermini.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/possession04.jpg |
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mindbender/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High
Żuławski's directorial style is a unique one. You can distinctly
tell when you're watching a Żuławski film. The few that I have seen can be
counted on a full, single hand with one additional finger - in order of
preference On The Silver Globe (1988),
this, The Third Party of the Night (1971),
Diabel (1972) and Szamanka (1996) - and all of them are a
perpetual machine of heightened energy that can exhaust a viewer unprepared for
them. It's not all shrieking or extremity, as Possession is built as much from moments of calm or immense sadness
- Mark coming out of a three week binge of separation anxiety only to realise
their son Bob's been left all alone in the family home - the moments of trauma
with an electric carving knife or the parents hitting each other of set by
tragedy of a relationship breaking to pieces as painfully as possible. The
dialogue is poetic, at times difficult to catch from how fast its spoken or how
the cracking voices distort it, the unnatural body horror an extension of these
emotions. As in David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979), it literalises the
ideal of horror cinema being a projection of human anxieties and emotions.
The stranger parts of the film,
as in other Żuławski films, add to
the maddened tone, at times as if the film is continually hurtling alone to the
point it'll collapse like Mark on a motorbike at one point. But somehow it
manages to sustain itself at full speed to the end credits. Men in shocking
pink socks vie with an unexpected car crash, and there's of course Bennent's performance as Heinrich which
is strange in itself, a cat suit wearing Zen lover still living with his
mother, in the pains of delirium at points with as much intensity as Mark and
Anna, even more so at points until he goes blind in one moment. Trying to
locate his soul later on is far from a pointless tangent into the spiritual but
becomes real possibility, about to wander in on Mark considering the tone of
the film as it stands.
The film already leaps into the
metaphysical beyond the tentacled possession with Anna's double, a nursery
school teacher Helen also played by Adjani.
She is meant to be the saint to Anna's whore, white dress with pigtails and a concern
for Bob, but on this viewing there's something far too deep and pulsating in
the green contact lenses Adjani has
to wear, something too white about the dress and her flirtations with Mark are far
more obvious the more you watch the film, a greater depth and mudding of that
stereotype. That doesn't even add what the squid entity turns out to be,
complicating things further, and when the film ends on an apocalyptic note, the
world effected by this relationship, it's the only appropriate ending for a
work like it.
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| From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CETv7q5ZEbk/TrhOBHB1FfI/AAAAAAAAHDQ/ FeBc27sO3b4/s1600/possession%2B17.jpg |
Personal Opinion:
Possession's a lot to take, still too much for me to fully digest. So
much is utterly absurd, some of it even silly, but most of it is still
startling to watch. The performances linger in my mind and the tone is so delirious
that to use the word "delirious" seems mistaken, instead as if the
emotions depicted have been allowed to be felt through every pore of the
actors' bodies. Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, which I've seen
the theatrical cut of only, is an intense film and there's actually little
difference between the two films despite Żuławski
responding with what he felt was a more accurate depiction of the subject
matter. The acting in Bergman's film
is just as unrelenting but its depicted entirely from a realism. Żulawksi's film includes the unreal and
the subconscious, allowing it to walk out into reality. Hence not only the body
horror but also the almost hypnotised acting styles from the cast. Experiencing
Possession feels like being
hypnotised yourself, thrown through one emotional current another without
respite. Why would anyone want to watch this reading that sentence? When for
someone, cinema is never just a comfort food. It prickles emotions barely
touched. The inappropriately silly moments, the disturbing moments, the genre
blurring and the unpredictability, all of it's a standard bearer for a cinema
of the abstract if there was any.
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