Repulsion

After reading Destin Hick's blog entry entitled "Stay Alive and the Elizabeth Bathory Myth", I felt compelled to write this week's response on the 1965 Roman Polanski psychological thriller, Repulsion.  In the film, a young and beautiful girl named Carole, played by Catherine Deneuve, is distraught when left alone by her sister, who leaves for vacation with her boyfriend Michael.  Carole is repulsed by the fact that Michael has been basically living with her sister, Helen, and tried to throw his razor and toothbrush away more than once. 
Carole obviously has some issues.  She has fantasies (which I interpreted as sexual, and the tagline for the movie seems to confirm that) in which unknown male intruders rape her in the night and hands with no bodies grab through the walls at her arms, legs, and breasts.  She often awakes from these fantasies on the floor naked outside her room.  She seems tortured by the fact she can hear her sister getting screwed every night through the walls of her bedroom.  I feel that she is both jealous and repulsed by these sounds, as it is her sister that is making the sounds (Wouldn't you feel weird hearing your sister have sex?) and she is jealous because she wants someone to screw her, too.  However, she does seem very genuinely repulsed by men and never seems to act on her sexual desires in reality.  For example, a kind boy named Colin falls in love with her and kisses her, only to have her run away to wash her mouth out.  Later, he visits her to profess his feelings, only to have his head bashed in by a candlestick. 

However, the audience has to wonder if something sinister occured to cause Carole to have such psychosis.  We do see a scene in which the landlord attempts to rape Carole while trying to collect rent (he is slashed to death by Michael's razor) and at the film's close, a close-up of an old family photo shows Carole glaring at a man standing beside her.  Who is this man?  Is it her father?  Why is she staring at him with such an awful gaze?  Did he molest her?  Rape her?  There are many unanswered questions to that regard, but she is very afraid to be without her sister and seems very over protective of her, so the audience is given some clues that perhaps something very traumatic happened to Carole as a child.  

Carole's descent into deep insanity is portrayed very nicely by Polanski.  Her life is an utter state of repulsion.  She is repulsed by her sister's sex sounds, the old ladies at the beauty parlor where she works (one of which she stabs in the finger whilst giving a manicure), men in general (an old lady makes a remark about how men only want one thing and will do anything to get it, and it seems to have some affect on Carole, as the camera does a close-up of the woman's mouth as she is speaking those words).  She leaves out a killed rabbit her sister was going to cook for dinner but never did, letting the body rot openly while she keeps its severed head in her purse.  After she kills the two men, she puts Colin's body in a bathtub full of water and leaves the landlord under the couch; both corpses rotting openly.  Strangly, she seems at home around the rotting corpses, and begins acting normally after killing (after she kills and hides Colin, she is shown sewing and humming in a care-free manner).  She also begins missing work for days at a time and sees hallucinations such as cracks in the walls and the sexual ones as mentioned before.  By the tme her sister reurns and the film ends, Carole is found in a catatonic state under her sister's bed.  Her sister is frightened and repulsed at her sister and her acts.   
I think Polanski did a great job with this film, and I like how he added sound effects such as dripping water in moments of psychosis.  I also like how he added a ringing phone or some other distraction to show the seemingly strained relationship between Carole and her sister, amongst other things.  I recommend this film to anyone who likes a good psychological thriller/1960s film.