Possession

Second Sight

First the blah — new print, restored, beautiful box, loads of extras, mouth-watering book, fantastic art, pictures of beautiful people in terrible situations. If you love this film you’ll want this new edition; if you don’t know this film then this is a beautiful way to experience it for the first time.

This looks like its been put together by someone who understands that this film should be right up there in the pantheon and is bewildered that, even now, after all this internet we’ve had to endure, it still feels somehow like a niche concern and is remembered mostly for that scene when Isabelle Adjani screams in the subway and gives birth to goo. Didn’t Massive Attack and Young Fathers do a video based on that? I think they did. Well, they’re to blame too, because if ever there was a film resistant to clipology and reductionism, it’s this one.

SPOILER ALERT — if you haven’t seen the film, don’t read on. Just take from all these words that it’s very likely to be a film that you want in your life. If you’re still human, that is.

To be fair, you can see why this film would have been annoying / perplexing to reviewers back in 1981, and many of those issues remain. It is genre-(and gender-)bending in every way. Is it a monster movie? A psychological thriller? A spy film, even, with heavily codified Cold War chic? Maybe it’s the brutal equivalent of those divorced dad records from the ’70s, run through with a thick seam of anti-feminist vitriol? No, maybe it’s actually a very feminist movie, showing what happens if male and female desire are really put on the stage together and asked to sing?

Well, no spoilers, but it’s surely at least all of these things and probably more as well. I must have seen this film more than any other (I don’t tend to watch movies multiple times, so I mean I’ve seen this at least five times) and each time it feels a little different, like it follows you around your own timeline and finds new ways to taunt you.

There’s two people, they’re probably getting a divorce. The separation doesn’t go well. If you could imagine the plot of Vince Vaughan and Jennifer Aniston‘s The Break-Up on acid then… no; that’s lazy and it’s also nothing like that, unless you somehow managed to get HP Lovecraft in as a marriage guidance counsellor and he provided the drugs. Okay, reviewers from 1981 who didn’t know what to make of this film, I see you; it’s worryingly difficult to get a fix even if, on many levels, it’s barely abstract at all. It follows many of the conventions of genre films and it absolutely skips along. This is not slow cinema.

I think one of the problems is that, why it might well be about Anna (Adjani) and her monsters, it’s also at least as much about the utter debilitating terror of her suitors (husband Mark and lover Heinrich) when confronted with the awesome reality of her desire. A lot more of the film is about their breakdown than you’d imagine from the clips that get thrown around social media. She’s central, but she’s not isolated in her craziness, not like, say, Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

This is not just a beautiful girl goes crazy trope. Just look at what else is going on here with the guys, who are often rendered literally speechless and sputtering by Anna’s mere presence. In other films, we’ve seen men reduced to stuttering by powerful and beautiful women (Hugh Grant was great at this), but there’s not even a glimmer of humour about this here, no release at all. These male psyches are subject to brutal dissection — we’re watching the same awful fear that Sigmund Freud saw in the Nazis and led everyone involved to think maybe it was a good idea to put up a fucking massive wall in the centre of Berlin to keep the other away.

Houses are important in this film and the two main locations — a flat that looks simultaneously too big and too small for its occupants and a broken high-ceilinged apartment in Kreuzburg that seems like a set from Dangerous Liaisons that has been left out in the rain too long — overlook the Berlin Wall. They are important characters in this film, you feel. They seem to show disgust at their human occupants and the walls often feel like they are breathing heavily.

But back to the men. Mark is an exemplary ambivalent cuckold, knowing and not knowing what Anna is doing, and loving and not-loving her in almost equal measures. Sam Neill is a wonder here, going from boy to man and back again several times in the same scene and staying strangely believable throughout. You see his soul coming out of his body several times. Adjani is a different kind of revelation, all elbows and wrists and Masonic Distress signals; she seems battered by her own sexuality and by the realisation that none of the men in her life can hope to withstand its power.

There is also a them of cuckoldry running throughout, deepening the sense of male confusion and fear. Mark is the exemplar ambivalent cuckhold (remember, a true cuckold has no real awareness of the deception); he both knows what Anna is doing and he doesn’t know — this could easily have been an acting disaster, but Sam Neill really pulls this off. Every look is perfect. He’s a boy and a man and, even though its obvious he’s got a world of subterfuge on his side (he’s a non-specific spy in a very specific Cold War setting), it’s also obvious that an understanding of this world of boys’ secrets is no match for a woman like Anna. Or any woman.

Possession has been compared to Repulsion (the JG Ballardian crush of the interiors, the pop-eyed crawling woman) and actually still reminds me of Jean-Luc Godard‘s signature break-up / down in Le Mepris, as it did when I first watched it, but this is much darker than both. Even the lighting seems continually at half-mast, as if even the sun fears rising.

Despite appearances and the clips that are often shared on the socials, it’s much less focused on female neuroses than Repulsion. The ‘monster’ is generated by Anna, of course, but she is (at times) in control. She’s almost there. Almost. Almost. Almost, as she says in the most revealing part of the film. The men try to dominate her, with violence (Mark) or sex (Heinrich) but they never get far. Even the homosexual men, immune to her charms (in all senses of the word — she is as much a Priestess as a sacrifice), are drawn into the webbing. They stutter, they disbelieve their own sexuality, they die anyway. Anna wins, even if each victory simply makes her journey towards sexual fulfilment seem a little more infinite. Almost, almost, almost. The little death is just not there

Heinrich, of course, is the man that men hate. Women might find him annoying, but men will hate him on sight. Mark hates him, feels sorry for him, hates him some more. Fey, hard as nails, sexually confident, ‘artistic’, Oedipal. He’s like the character in that great Momus song “The Homosexual” (clue: that character wasn’t gay either). Again, Andrzej Żuławski is telling us a story about men… Anna is used here (as are all the female characters: the repulsive friend; the idealised non-teaching doppelganger teacher) as a wind that bends them; that she creates a monster is besides the point. The madness lies elsewhere in this film. That scene could have been replaced by another; it could have been removed entirely and the film would not have been dimmed.

And if you need evidence that this is less about Anna’s possession than the male lack of it, then the scene in the ballet school, with Anna breaking the third wall (and breaking the third leg) and returning the male gaze with compound interest. This is perhaps what Jean-Paul Sartre meant by ‘the gaze’. This scene could be unnecessarily titillating; in fact it’s just wholly uncomfortable — you could use that expression for the entire film.

-Loki-