Repulsion (1965)

Peter's Nite
Microscopic portions of salmon, baked vegetables, brownies
Or, as Stuart would put it: "Dead rabbit, dead rabbit, dead rabbit..."

Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" via Greenmanreviews:

One could easily get the impression from his films that director Roman Polanski does not recommend apartment life. Three of his films, forming an unofficial trilogy, concern characters -- apartment dwellers all -- who variously succumb to different kinds of insanity.

In Repulsion, Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian manicurist, lives with her sister and her sister's fiancee in a London apartment. The couple go away on a vacation, leaving Carol alone in the flat. While they are away, Carol begins hallucinating that she is not alone in the apartment. A man appears in her dressing mirror for a split second then disappears. Hands reach out from the walls and molest her. She is unable to function otherwise, forgetting to eat and leaving food out to rot.

This culminates in a rape sequence where Polanski hints at the reality by including only the "real" sounds -- a clock ticking, Carol's own breathing and heartbeat, and the rustle of the sheets as she fights her "attacker." The trauma of this experience completes Carol's break with reality. When a friend later calls on her, concerned that she hasn't been to work, she takes him for an intruder.

Upon viewing Repulsion, many psychologists commended Polanski's accurate depiction of schizophrenia. They were surprised when Polanski admitted that he and co-screenwriter Gerard Brach had simply written Carol's behavior as a natural response to the circumstances. They had done no research.

Biography on Polanski:

Director, actor. Born Raimund Polanski, on August 18, 1933, in Paris, France. At the age of three, Polanski moved with his family to his father’s native city of Krakow, Poland. In 1941, his parents were imprisoned in various Nazi concentration camps, where his mother eventually died in Auschwitz. In order to escape deportation, Polanski lived with several different Polish families until he was reunited with his father in 1944.

As a teenager, Polanski developed his acting skills in radio dramas and films. In 1954, he enrolled at the Polish National Film Academy in Lodz, where his body of work consisted of short films and documentaries. Upon his graduation, he appeared in a number of movies—many of which were the work of famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda, including Lotna (1959), Innocent Sorcerers (1960), and Samson (1961). In 1962, he directed his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water . The international recognition that followed, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, gave Polanski the chance to bring his movies to a more mainstream audience. The following year, he moved to London, where his next offering, the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), was considered equally compelling by critics and audiences.

In 1968, Polanski moved to Hollywood, making his American film debut with the classic thriller Rosemary's Baby, which featured exceptional performances by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Despite his burgeoning film career, Polanski endured a devastating tragedy the following year when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult. The extreme violence experienced by Polanski throughout his life was often reflected in his films, which tended to focus on the darker themes of alienation and evil—most notably, in the modern film noir Chinatown (1974), featuring John Huston, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway.

In 1977, Polanski was indicted on six criminal counts for having sexual relations with a minor. The alleged act took place with a 13-year-old girl, in the home of the actor Jack Nicholson. Both Nicholson and his longtime girlfriend, actress Anjelica Huston, testified against Polanski when the highly publicized case was brought to trial. Polanski pleaded guilty to one charge of unlawful sexual intercourse and underwent six weeks of psychiatric evaluation at a state prison in California. Although additional criminal charges were still pending, Polanski fled the United States after his discharge. (While authorities are not actively seeking him out, he does face the possibility of prison if he returns to America.)

Kim Morgan on Repulsion:

The obscure, slippery and decayed complexities of such desire are conveyed brilliantly in Repulsion. The diseased atmosphere of Carol's womb is meticulously created with Polanski's use of camera angles, sound effects and images of clutter. Though music is used effectively, Polanski relies more on amplifying the sounds of everyday life--the ticking of a clock, the voices of nuns playing catch in the convent garden, the dripping of a faucet--to convey the acute awareness Carol acquires in response to her fear. Polanski also dresses the film with pertinent details that further exemplify both Carol's madness and the aching passage of time: Potatoes sprout in the kitchen, meat (rabbit meat, no less) rots on a plate and eventually collects flies, various debris of blood, food and liquids form naturally around Carol. The film's inventive use of black-and-white film, wide-angle lenses and close-ups creates an unsparing vision of sickness, and Deneuve's performance is effectively mysterious. The viewer, however, is able to empathize with Carol, which is how she lures us into her web in the first place. As Polanski cameraman Gil Taylor muttered during filming, "I hate doing this to a beautiful woman."

Yet one loves to do this to a beautiful woman, especially one like Deneuve--at first. Deneuve's loveliness makes Carol's madness more palatable (her unfortunate suitor thinks she is odd, but he can't help but "love" this gorgeous woman), but eventually it becomes horrifying. Carol is not simply a Hitchcockian aberration of what lies beneath the "perfect woman," she is the reflection of what lies beneath repressed desire--in men and women. Polanski has a knack for casting women who are nervously exciting (Faye Dunaway in Chinatown is a blinking, twitching mess), and therefore dangerous to desire. He makes one insecure about longing for them. Deneuve is certainly nerve-racking. She is so physically flawless that she often seems half human: An anemic girl, she can barely lift up her arm, yet at the same time she is highly sensual, an ample, heavily breathing woman with more than a glint of carnality in her dreamily vacant eyes. Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery--she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain. What Polanski finds intriguing and revolting is perceptively female, making Repulsion a woman's picture more women may want to know.