REPULSION
The moral is, if you eat rabbit, you'll go insane

  If there's some grand visual aspect to this film I fail to mention, it must be said that I watched this movie on a four-inch LCD screen that was top of the line five years ago, and now it's, well, not.

Roman Polanski has directed a small stack of films in the mid-sixties to early seventies that are either horror or have strong horror overtones - not all of which have endeared themselves to me.  I've yet to see Fearless Vampire Killers, but I was astounded at how much Rosemary's Baby bored the living shit out of me.  His version of Macbeth, however, I found to be engrossing and a marvelous embodiment of just about everything I ever got a kick out of with that play.  The execution of Repulsion is quite unlike the in-your-face approach of Macbeth, but it's just as effective, and though slow-paced, definitely a worthwhile experience.

Catherine Deneuve (and her impenetrable French accent) stars as Carol, a young woman living in a London apartment with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) and working at a beauty salon.  Every article and review you'll ever read about this movie mentions that Carol is "sexually repressed", in just those words, and it's accurate enough - she is obviously a very shy girl who doesn't feel the least bit comfortable with the idea of romantic relationships (she's probably a Catholic).  Repression ain't the half of it - this poor girl looks very depressed over something, and probably needs fairly intense observation just to make sure she doesn't start tying her bedsheets into a noose.  200mg of fluoxetene to Carol, STAT!

Of course, the universe conspires to penetrate that repression - complete strangers gawk at her, hit on her, ask her out, while she bashfully slinks away.  She strains in her bed to block out the sound of her sister's lovemaking in the next room, which, well, I can relate to.  Even the camera won't let her be her, constantly intruding on activities she wouldn't dare let any man have a good look at (undressing, for example, or one scene where she washes her feet in a particularly leg-exposing position).

When Helen goes off on a holiday, Carol is left to look after the apartment by herself, something she's not really psychologically equipped for.  When she hears creaks and footsteps, they don't just fade off into other bumps in the night - they spiral upwards into full-blown hallucinations as her fears of rape and her own sexuality take on a life of their own.

This is the slowest-paced good movie I've ever seen, Polanski squeezing in a lot of tick-tock sounds as if to grind it down to the pace of actual clockwatching.  The movie is half over before it shows the slightest indication of being a horror movie, and many viewers are likely to lose patience with the film in its first half.  I found myself interested, though hardly enthralled.

The second half is a hell of a creepy show, though.  Man, those sounds in the night work, even from a tinny little speaker in the side of a four-inch TV set.  I said it about The Blair Witch Project, and I'll say it again here - scary noises aren't scary unless they're identifiable, or at least close to identifiable.  If a sound can really be anything (like the plethora of rumblings and wheezes and whines in the remake for The Haunting), then does it matter in the least what it ultimately is?

Spooky sounds give way here to some pretty nutty hallucinations, and I don't think these scenes are quite as effective as the sound-driven ones a little earlier, they're still spooky and harrowing.

This was once banned in Finland, despite there being only two scenes of violence, one of which is over almost before you know it - those wacky Scandinavians are always finding some reason or another to ban things. (to be fair, the other violent scene had me cringing and grimacing all the way through)

This isn't really a movie I'd recommend to anybody who isn't already firmly a fan of the genre; I suspect that people new(er) to horror would be as bored by this as I was by Rosemary's Baby.  But if you're reading this, you'd probably do well to give it a look.

Not that I'll be donating 140 more minutes of my life to Rosemary's Baby any time soon.

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