| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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POSSESSION
Rating: 
West Germany/France. 1981.
Director/Screenplay – Andrzej Zulawski, Adaptation/Dialogue – Zulawski & Frederic Tuten, Producer – Marie-Laure Reyre, Photography – Bruno Nuytten, Music – Andrzej Korzynski, Music (US Version) – Art Phillips, Special Effects – Charles-Henri Assola & Daniel Braunschweig, Creature Effects – Carlo Rambaldi, Art Direction – Holger Gross. Production Company – Marianne/Oliane/Soma.
Cast:
Isabelle Adjani (Anna/Helen), Sam Neill (Marc), Heinz Bennett (Heinrich), Margit Carstensen (Margie), Michael Hogben (Bob), Shaun Lawton (Zimmerman)
Plot: Secret agent Marc returns home from an assignment only for his wife Anna to tell him that she is leaving him for another man, Heinrich. The breakup causes their mutual sanities to fray. He becomes involved with their son’s teacher Helen who resembles Anna. She kills several people and gives birth to a bizarre creature in a subway. He hires two detectives to follow her and eventually discovers that her new lover is a tentacular creature.
This bizarre oddity was a film that nobody quite knew what to make of it when it came out, but is one that has steadily been gaining ground as a weird headspace classic ever since. Quite what it is about could be anybody’s guess. It is filled with bizarre events that are delivered at a pitch of histrionic melodramatics. Variously:– Sam Neill tries to slash his wrists with an electric breadknife over his marriage breakup and then finds a perfected twin of Adjani in the schoolteacher Anna; she after about five minutes of wailing and vomiting in a subway tunnel gives birth to a tentacled monster that she spends the rest of the film fucking (it later turns into a twin of Neill). A pair of detectives with pink socks wander through the film. In the end Neill and Adjani’s son tries to drown himself in the bath, before everything ends in the flash of a nuclear detonation.
All of this bizarreness is considerably aided by director Andrzej Zulawski’s demented visual style. Zulawski seems only ever to be able to direct at a manically deranged pace or in vacuously dull meaningful pauses. The camera continuously wanders in and out of rooms in long tracking shots and there are weird disjointed lapses between shots. The streets, trains, cafes and bars of West Berlin (where the film was shot) seem to be completely empty of people. The film is lit in a washed-out blue light and the characters all painted in white-face – along with the hysterically shrieked performances of both Neill and Adjani the film seems more like kabuki theatre colliding with European art house cinema at its most willfully pretentious. Somehow in all of this Adjani was awarded the Palm D’Or for Best Actress Award at Cannes that year for the role. Certainly she should be celebrated for being able to attain an entire film at the histrionic pitch of a near-nervous breakdown – but is it a great performance?
Zulawski feels like he has much he wants to say. Symbolism – The Berlin Wall representing divisions, everybody seeks perfected clone versions of the other – often looms as though he is pointing a big arrow at it. But what he is really trying to make a film about is not at all clear – marriage breakup? an out-and-out horror film? monsters from the Id? There is so much going on that everything eventually collapses into symbolic overkill, not to mention total narrative incoherence. You can draw nominal similarities to David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) which featured a husband trying to rescue his estranged wife from a psychotherapeutic technique that allowed her to express herself by physically giving birth to monsters. Possession could almost be a subjective, internalized Brood – one that comes sans the explaining rationale of pschyotherapeutic techniques. Indeed Possession almost seems to inhabit the same kind of surreal interior territory as Polanski’s mental breakdown film Repulsion (1965) – it seems to be a subjective work from the inside of the emotional traumas of separation. But if that is what it is, Zulawski gives us no handholds. Everybody in the film seems totally nuts and it is never clear whose emotional trauma we are seeing – Neill’s or Adjani’s. That said there is definitely a small cult that regards this as a minor masterpiece. Even Sam Neill called this the favourite among his films.
The international version of the film runs to 127 minutes, the US distributor cut 45 minutes out and attempted to rearrange scenes in a vain attempt to provide greater clarity. It didn’t help. The original US cinematic release was promoted with free barf bags; in the UK the film was declared a video nasty and banned.
Ukranian-born, Polish-based director Zulawski has made a number of other films since, including The Silver Globe (1987), Boris Godunov (1989), My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days (1989) and Fidelity (2000). Zulawksi’s one other venture into horror cinema has been The Devil (1988), a historical film set in 19th Century Poland that depicts the barbarism of the period with reportedly extremely graphic results.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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