Divorce Unsettlement

Film lovers of a certain vintage have much to thank the Department Of Public Prosecutions for. In 1983 the government’s smut-finders general released a list of movies so shockingly depraved, so utterly dangerous that they must be consigned to legal oblivion. Behold the video nasties! And thus a whole generation of future cinephiles was provided with its first ‘must see’ list. 

In the decades that have followed some of those cinematic outlaws have been recognised as venerable genre classics – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Last House On The Left (1972), The Evil Dead  (1981) – others have revealed themselves as the meretricious, if entertaining, exploitation tat that they always were. They have been defanged, neutered, and rendered safe.

Apart from one.

Andrzej Zulawski’s lunatic divorce drama Possession has always defied any easy characterisation and is undiminished by the passage of time. It is as shocking, unmooring, bizarre and gruelling today, forty years later, as it was when it was being snatched by plod from the lower shelves of mom-and-pop video stores.

Describing Possession, as anyone who has witnessed it will know, is a fool's errand. It is, superficially an account of a break-up. Set in Cold War West Berlin Mark (Sam Neill) is a spy who arrives home to find his small apartment deserted, his five-year-old son, apparently abandoned. When his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) arrives it is clear that their relationship is doomed. She teeters on the edge of mania, while Neill alternates between violent rage and a glassy-eyed, beaming stupor. 

The pair row, she slices her throat with an electric carving knife, Mark has a go at his own arm with the same kitchen utensil. An attempt at reconciliation in a cafe ends with Mark smashing it up. Mark assaults his wife, and in one of the film’s many surreal, profoundly upsetting images, Anna, blood gushing from her mouth, heads off into the city. This concludes the sanest part of the proceedings. 

Anna undergoes a shrieking, almost unwatchable breakdown in a deserted subway and either births or miscarries a . . . something. Subsequently, Mark discovers Anna has a pied-a-terre, a decaying flat which she shares with a nightmarish tentacled monster which she occasionally fucks, and sometimes... feeds. He confronts the lover Heinrich (played with a deli’s worth of well-aged ham by Heinz Bennent) who humiliates and finally karate-chops him. There is a fridge full of human body parts, Anna’s doppelganger turns up, a character suffers death by lavatory.

The third act is indescribable.

Zulawski had been pretty much exiled from his native Poland after 1972’s The Devil (banned) and On the Silver Globe (abandoned in the mid-1970s). He went through a turbulent divorce, which formed the inspiration for the film that would become his indubitable masterpiece. “I saw exactly what Mark sees when he opens the door to his flat, which is an abandoned, messy child in an empty flat and a woman who is doing something, somewhere else,” he would later say.

And it is that shock, the Hitchcock-zoom of a world inexplicably warping, that provides the key to understanding Possession, if it can be understood at all. 

Films, both Hollywood and arthouse have tackled break-ups before, of course. From Bergman’s 1974 Scenes From A Marriage (which Zulawski had seen and which had left him cold) through Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) to Danny DeVito’s sublime The War Of The Roses (1989), the terminal stages of matrimony have been sanded down and transformed into approachable, three-hanky narratives. But Zulewski has no interest in telling a story. Just as pain is not coherent, Possession obeys no logical rules. The agony is raw - exploding into the world, warping it, transforming it, figuratively – and given some interpretations of the film’s final moments, literally – ending it.

It would be remiss not to note that, amidst this roiling, wailing, chaos the film is not without both a mordant sense of humour, often missed on the first viewing (and even those who love it approach a second with an understandable sense of trepidation) as well as a political subtext. ‘Does the target still wear pink socks?’ asks one of Mark’s handlers as genius DoP Bruno Nuytten’s disconcerting wide-angle lens swoops and swirls around a vast, empty conference room early in the film. The Berlin Wall, occasionally glanced at from the couple’s flat, disfigures the city, a physical scar that mirrors the character’s inner mutilation.

Placing Obsession in any kind of cinematic context is almost impossible. There are shades of Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), with its motif of inner torment expressed as gooey external monstrosities, maybe a soupcon of Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). And it has distinct echoes in some contemporary movies. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) gestures both to its visual excesses and its conjuring of a sense of madness. But the contemporary director who owes the most to it is Gaspar Noe, both in the unique blend of brutality and sentiment of Irreversible (2002), but more acutely in the distorted world of Enter The Void (2009), in which the protagonist’s agony spills outwards and deforms the reality around them.

The shoot was notoriously hard on the principal cast. Zulawski described voodoo rites he had witnessed in Haiti as his performance benchmark. Nothing, absolutely nothing was ‘too much’. The result is a brace of hysterical, ant-realist, absurdist turns that start somewhere north of eleven and rocket skywards. Isabelle Adjani would win at Cannes for her work – and deservedly, if it isn’t the best acting in a motion picture that year it is certainly the most [ITAL] acting in a motion picture that year – before suffering a breakdown, and possibly a suicide attempt, brought on by the role. 

“It was a motherfucking surreal time,” Neill would later say. “Zulawski was a genius, but crazed. He asked so much more of you than you could possibly give. He asked much more than a director should.” (Creature designer Carlo Rambaldi, who had got the gig after H.R. Giger was unavailable, added to the general sense of lunacy by lovingly delivering each iteration of his Lovecraftian obscenity to the set in a handmade coffin.)

Possession divides audiences to this day. For some its abject lunacy, its boundless cruelty, is unbearable. For others, it is the nearest thing to human insanity, pain and madness in their rawest, most uncompromising forms spilt across a cinema screen, but shot through with a deeply human sympathy for this pair trapped in their folie-a-deux. But what it does not do is leave you unchanged. Once you’ve seen it, endured it, survived it, Possession never lets you go.