Opening credits. Close up of an eye. The title Repulsion floats by. The eye darts around nervously. The credit DIRECTED BY ROMAN POLANSKI slashes horizontally across the screen. The camera pulls back. The eye belongs to Catherine Deneuve. She holds the hand of a middle aged woman whose face is covered by a grotesque mask of facial mud. Deneuve plays Carol, a manicurist who has once again zoned out into her own world…
Repulsion came out in 1965, three years before Polanski unleashed Rosemary’s Baby on the general public. The plot is simple enough. Carol and her older sister, Helen, (Yvonne Furneaux), are two Belgian girls living together in Swinging London. Helen is an outgoing, older woman who is having an affair with a wealthy businessman. Carol is a shy and unstable virgin who is terrified and fascinated by sex — a condition made worse by her beauty, which attracts the kind of swinging, leering animal men who always assume no no no means yes yes yes. When Helen and her lover go on an extended European holiday, Carol descends into madness.
Identifying with Carol is difficult. She is moody, sullen and withdrawn. At first Polanski’s roving camera brings us into her world as voyeurs. We walk with Carol, spy on her, gaze into the impenetrable mask of her beauty. Then we share a voyeuristic moment with her, feeling her frustration as she tries to sleep through the noise of her sister’s lovemaking. We begin to see what she sees: Neighbors framed by the peephole in the door, the play of light and shadow on the ceiling, the grotesque upside down mouth of supine beauty salon patron.
The rhythm of Repulsion also puts us in Carol’s world. Time vanishes into a series small vignettes. It’s daytime and Carol sews and sings to herself. It’s raining outside at night and Carol lies in her bed tracing a crack in the wall. It’s day again and a skinned rabbit she intended to cook is festering with flies. Time fades in and out for Carol — she loses minutes, hours, days, and we lose them with her. And despite her obvious insanity, most of what she does is eerily familiar. Have you ever been just a little too nervously aware of the creaks of a settling house, or the footsteps of someone walking outside your door? Have you ever stopped while getting dressed in the morning and suddenly realized you’ve just been staring into space? Have you ever placed a rotting rabbit’s head in your purse instead of the rent check? Okay, well maybe not…
As Carol sinks further into dementia, Polanski forces us to share her hallucinations. The most frightening is a shadowy, leering rapist who appears whenever Carol contemplates anything with sexual overtones. An act as innocent as admiring a dress or putting on lipstick may be the transgression that causes the shadowy man to attack in unearthly silence.
Soon the apartment itself becomes a reflection of Carol’s mind. We’ve already seen how movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Shock portray a surreal link between the homes that trap the lead characters and the secrets that hide inside them. In Repulsion, Carol’s mind is her trap, and soon her apartment becomes a direct manifestation of that mind. Rooms grow in size. Cracks spontaneously appear with sounds like gunshots. The walls become soft, like clay, and clutching hands erupt from their surface.
The identification between Carol and her apartment is so close that when Colin, (John Fraser I), her frustrated would-be boyfriend, breaks the apartment door down, it is, for all practical purposes, a rape. (It is even set up as a rape by a preceding scene in which Colin’s mates at the pub ridicule and egg him into violence.) Although Colin is apologetic as soon as the door is broken, he still ultimately gets what’s coming to him…
In the end, Carol gets completely lost inside her giant apartment mind. She withdraws into a catatonic state. We never discover a cause for her insanity. Instead Polanski and screenwriter Gérard Brach take us to a mad precipice and let us peer over the edge, offering no soothing explanations to make things safe again. That’s why, even to this day, this is such an unnerving film.
Repulsion leaves us with just one tantalizing clue to the enigma of Carol’s insanity. After a wandering survey of the wreckage of her apartment, the camera zooms in on a family photograph, on the face of Carol as a child. She looks off fearfully at something we will never see.
Close up of an eye: a gateway to the disturbing world we glimpsed against our will.
(Next time: When is a trapped woman, not a trapped woman? Find out in Polanski’s The Tenant.)
Unpacking Decades 