Zulawski orgy roundup part 3: Without you, I wouldn't feel anything at all

(Image: Smashbox Studios)

(My previous entries on BAM Rose Cinema's Andrzej Zulawski series can be found here, here and here.)


Sometimes you have to go crazy to tell the truth. A scene early in Possession (1981) finds Sam Neill as a betrayed and estranged husband, camped out in rented quarters, red-eyed, unshaven and grimy in sweat-soaked, days-old clothes. He thrashes about on his bed like an inconsolable toddler, calls his wife but can't speak, and careens around his room and down the corridor, running into walls, collapsing on the floor, flailing and moaning like a wounded animal - in other words, embodying the Zulawski hero par excellence.


Somewhere in the course of this tableau, I recalled my own experience of bottom-of-the-barrel romantic despair, the worst days and weeks of a dysfunctional relationship close to a decade ago. And I realized that this was exactly how I felt at the time - that the only reason I didn't indulge myself similarly was my deep-seated commitment to certain norms of civilized behavior, and my network of patiently supportive friends and family. Also, I had to go to work. But if I could have gotten away with it, I would have approximated Neill's performance. With that thought, the distance between myself and the alien being on the screen collapsed into an identification as close as that with a twin brother. The filmmaker's world not only made sense to me - it became, at least briefly, my world. Never did I see more clearly that in his own way he's trying to be quite direct - by clearing away the masks of conventional expression to expose raw emotions and naked psyches. 

(Image: Atelier Tovar)

This goes some way towards explaining why Possession is my favorite Zulawski. But there's also just the fact that amidst my elitism, I'm really a populist (please see blog title above). Of all his films, this one sticks most closely to Hollywood-conventional storytelling logic and pacing, and much of it fits into the horror category, which is close to my favorite popular genre and one that particularly suits this director's sensibility (if only Zulawski had made a kung fu movie...). Saying "most accessible Zulawski film" is a more than a bit like saying "most intellectual Three Stooges opus," but there it is.

That said, Possession is still as bonkers as a cat with five tin cans tied to its tail - the incredulous looks exchanged by audience members as the lights came up were priceless. It's a bit hard to discuss without spoiler-ish references to developments at roughly the mid-point, but the whole is so strange that knowing the (maybe) (marginally) strangest thing that happens shouldn't ruin it. The setup has Mark (Neill) returning to his West Berlin home from a mysterious business trip and finding his wife, and the mother of his young son, Anna (French superstar actress Isabelle Adjani) wanting to separate and eventually admitting to an affair. From there, the two leads go as feral as any performers in the director's portfolio while charting the disintegration of the couple's push-pull, love-hate relationship. Neill, an essentially sensible and even stolid actor, threatens to sprain every muscle in his face squeezing out an over-the-top style that's kind of unsuited to him, and all the more effectively unsettling for that. Adjani all but leaves humanity behind (taking Best Actress statuettes from Cannes and the Cesar awards with her), but finds surprising variation within the overall theme of shrieking and gibbering.  

(Image: Cinefamily)

Just when you think the weirdo dial is at the top, it keeps getting cranked up. There are self-mutilations with raw-meat-drenched kitchen implements and table-scattering freakouts in restaurants. Anna's doppelganger turns up unexplained as her son's teacher, and her best friend Margie turns up in a leg cast to dispense brittle sarcasm like a poor woman's Katharine Hepburn. Mark hires a gay private eye couple to tail Anna. Heinz Bennent is deliciously annoying and camp as Anna's older lover Heinrich, a tantric-New-Age-Eurotrash lothario wearing unbuttoned shirts and spouting pretentious aphorisms while beating up Mark with languid martial arts moves (Heinrich preaches free love but is incensed when Anna moves on from him, plying her with the peerless zen koan/pickup line, "I am the only one who can make demands on you because I claim nothing"). By the time grisly supernatural elements intrude into the narrative, one's reaction may be torn between "What?!" and "Oh, of course - where else could this go?"


Raising that topic inevitably gets me a little spoilery for both Possession and The Brood, David Cronenberg's startlingly parallel film from two years earlier. Each portrays the bitter collapse of a marriage, during which the wife spawns a monster or monsters from her body and corpses start piling up. Each filmmaker even admits that he created his film during, and in reaction to, the bitter collapse of his real-life marriage. 


The differences are more interesting than the similarities, though. Cronenberg, couching his personal themes in a low-budget, commercial horror movie, sticks to an investigative, mystery structure and provides a concrete science-fiction justification for the preternatural events. Zulawski, working within the state-subsidized European art film tradition, meanders through a deconstructed domestic melodrama studded with eruptions of horror, and actually works to obscure possible explanations. He also gets a bigger budget for better production values and better actors, and probably more rehearsal and pre-production time, contributing to his film being easily better than Cronenberg's (though the latter is an interesting piece of work in its own right). 

Samantha Eggar (in The Brood) and Isabelle Adjani model the
latest in makeup fashion for the hysterical female.
(Images: Den of Geek and Culture.Pl)

Most instructive are the differences in how the two movies treat marriage and male-female relationships. The Brood is almost embarrassingly blunt in its conflict between a long-suffering, self-sacrificing husband and a harridan of a spouse so selfish she becomes literally monstrous. Cronenberg's grotesque parody of the birth process, in particular, almost begs to be picked apart by feminist theorists. Not for nothing has the film been accused in some quarters of reactionary misogyny - of extreme backlash against the 1970s' increase of independence and power for women, including wives. (That might not be an entirely fair interpretation - Cronenberg has plenty else on his mind, including the correspondences between trendy pop psychology and cult religion - but it might not be entirely unfair either.)

Possession, on the other hand, portrays partners spiraling together into monstrosity in a way that rings truer to the fact that most relationships fail because of flaws on both sides, and to the way that a bad relationship can bring out the worst in both people. If Mark is anything approaching a self-portrait by Zulawski, it's a remarkably self-flagellating one - he seems marginally the most toxic of the two, at least until the point when Anna starts offing people to protect the slimy, tentacled offspring/lover she's hiding.


While Cronenberg laments the destruction of intimacy by selfishness and instability, Zulawski laments the trap inherent in intimacy itself - the knife-edge between bliss and madness when two people become something like one.  If (and I emphasize if) the message of The Brood is "Beware of crazy bitches," that of Possession is, "Love is a crazy bitch." Amen, brother.

Above: The international trailer (if I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times... spoilers).

For Possession's first U.S. release in '81, someone cut out forty minutes and tried to sell it as a splatter horror movie on the grindhouse circuit, resulting in this rather funny trailer.

Oh, Heinrich. You always get the last word.