Marathon UpdatePossession"I met a man who loved everything, and he died in a flood of shit." "The film was also very controversial when first released, and heavily edited for distribution in the United States. After an initial limited theatre release in the United Kingdom, Possession was banned as one of the notorious Video Nasties, although it was later released uncut on VHS in 1999. It gradually developed a minor cult following among arthouse aficionados."
"To call Zulawski's style operatic would be misleading, as that term implies a certain degree of refinement; between the camera, which hurtles breakneck through scenes as if hotly pursued, and the actors, who rarely speak a line of dialogue if it can be shrieked, the overall effect comes closer to emotional Grand Guignol."
"Mr. Zulawski is nonetheless an auteur to be approached with trepidation. His movies are seldom more than a step from some flaming abyss, with his actors (and audience) trembling on the edge. Typically shot with a frenzied, often subjective moving camera in saturated colors that have the over-bright feel of a chemically induced hallucination, these can be hard to watch and harder to forget. "
The film's first half comes on like Scenes from a Marriage as directed by Lars von Trier and played at 2x speed, a lacerating depiction of disintegration both marital and psychological, while the latter half steadily morphs into Repulsion by way of Cronenberg's The Brood
I wonder if an at least passing interest in other more outwardly expressive and less naturalistic inclined art forms (modern ballet for example) makes it easier to accept these performances.
It's not like I wasn't prepared. I'd read articles and listened to podcasts like Left Field Cinema. I'd seen Isabelle Adjani's train station freak out a couple of years ago. Even in context there comes a point where I'm no longer watching a character but an actor who keeps going long after director Andrzej Zulawski should have cut. I'm okay saying that Zulawski is doing something different, something I'm not accustomed to. I'm having a hard time - especially after only one film - saying this is good stuff.
It's better than The Woman, so at least there's clearly a level of stylistic competency at times that places it above trash. There's every reason to expect my knee to jerk at the hysterics, the bug-eyed acting and the increasingly non-sensical plot. Even removing some garish shots of actors staring too close into the lens and behaviors that seem to exist just to make the scene different. (I refer you to the above photo.) Even then there are simply too many scenes that bring up too many questions.
Take for example the scene where a man enters an apartment looking for his gay lover only to end up dead. Why does he react the way he does to the malformed tentacle creature on the bed? Why does he get closer to it? (It's Prometheus all over again.) Why does he turn his back on it? Why does he never ask Adjani any questions regarding the creature? Or even react when she claims to have been making love to it all day? He fires his gun at point blank range, so why does it do no good? I'm willing to accept that much of this movie exists on a more metaphorical level, a look at marital breakdown similar to Anti Christ. However, in a handful of scenes like this one Zulawski comes off as a painfully inept filmmaker. Why is it okay to take hack-y Stephen Sommers to task for his abundance of weak CG effects instead of a coherent narrative, yet Zulawski is praised for making actors shriek their way through his film?