Cinema: A Maiden Berserk

Repulsion more than lives up to its title. It also affords grisly evidence that 32-year-old Polish Director Roman Polanski, who won fame with Knife in the Water, is no slash-in-the-pan wonder boy but an imaginative and perverse master of the dark art of menace. Polanski’s first English-language film, Repulsion at first glance looks like a case study of a fragile psychopath. At second glance, or as often as a moviegoer can bear to peek through his knotted fingers, it is a Gothic horror story, a classic chiller of the Psycho school and approximately twice as persuasive.

The heroine, played with exquisite, deadly grace by Catherine Deneuve the radiant waif of Umbrellas of Cherbourg—is a French manicurist working in London. Her days pass among the minimal terrors of a de luxe beauty salon where she helps refinish the surfaces of wealthy, parchment-faced matrons. In the street outside lies a world of hot-mouthed males whose attentions send her into panicky flight. Every night in bed she waits, staring, petrified, until her uninhibited sister (Yvonne Furneaux) and a married lover come home to curdle a young girl’s blood with their noisy nocturnal diversions.

The crisis point is reached when the lovers leave for a holiday in Italy, abandoning the sexually repressed girl to her fantasies. And never has the inch-by-inch descent into total madness been more startlingly recreated on film. Slowly, Polanski assembles the fragments of a nightmare mosaic. A man’s undershirt, a razor and a skinned rabbit on a platter become objects of dread. An oppressive silence is broken only by the buzzing of flies, dripping water, a ticking clock. Rooms change shape, the mere flip of a light switch creates fissures in the walls, a phantom ravisher begins to stalk the tiny flat.

Each grey morning, while the laughter of nuns echoes from a nearby courtyard, it becomes clearer that awful deeds are imminent. One day the girl takes a rabbit’s severed head to work in her purse. The real and the unreal merge, and soon her human victims appear. The first is a suitor (John Fraser) whose conventional acts of gallantry lead to a gruesome end. Later an indignant landlord (played with mordant, bumbling humor by Patrick Wymark) comes to collect his rent and lingers to try his luck. Right up to the grisly climax, the audience seldom wonders what will happen, but endures agonies as to how and when.

In this simplified sexual interpretation of psychosis, no attempt is made to explain behavior except through the familiar device of a family portrait in which one sister stands aloof and stricken, while the other lies draped seductively over her father’s knees. Writer-Director Polanski nonetheless makes his fair murderess seem authentically tragic, herself the most pitiable victim of the evil she does. Whether such a film finally serves any purpose other than to scare people silly remains doubtful, yet in the long tradition of cinematic shockers, Repulsion looms as a work of monstrous art.