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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

A friend of mine nearly freaked out when we went to see The Tenant, Roman Polanski's follow-up to Chinatown. The end of the film is from the POV of the hero, and by now he's gone completely crazy. The people surrounding him (a cast which included the just-departed Shelly Winters) all look satanic to him, with red glowing eyes and tongues of fire. Later, my friend told me that this scene was very close to what his own hallucinations looked like. Oddly, his distress was a rave review-- Polanski got it exactly right.

Twelve years before that film, Polanski released his most famous exploration of madness, Repulsion (1965), starring Catherine Deneueve. At the time, it was praised by psychiatrists for the same thing that spooked my buddy: his accurate depiction, from the inside out, of insanity. Polanski claimed that he knew nothing about schizophrenia or similar illnesses, and just made up the story and the character. But then, he doesn't care for it much at all, claiming, "I always considered Repulsion the shabbiest of my films."

Catherine Deneueve has rarely looked as beautiful as she does as the main character, Carol, and she certainly never looked as vacant. As Carol stays in her apartment alone and the walls literally reach out for her as she descends into madness, it's her wide-yet-dead-eyed performance that makes the nightmare work. Her blinking and sudden nose-rubbing as she walks along get it across long befoe she takes up the straight-razor: this girl is really not right.

Repulsion is over forty years old now, and the city scenes do look dated, time-capsule shots of '60s England. (Carol's would-be beau looks like he stepped out of The Dave Clark Five.) Inside the apartment, though, the place is as unreal as the jungles of Skull Island. Besides the splitting walls and rotting rabbits (she imagines one and caused the other) are her fantasies of sexual assault, past and present. Those scenes are as free from time as Carol's mind.

There's a good DVD of Repulsion out, but it's British and only available in a Polanski boxed set. Quiz champ Wayne Palmer has seen it and enjoyed the dual commentary tracks with Polanski and Deneueve, although wishes they'd been recorded together. (Wayne also mentioned that Polanski originally wanted to cast Carol Lynley in the lead role.) The U.S. DVD isn't supposed to be good, and I know that the old VHS tape is only so-so. Once again, where is Criterion?

This was, bar none, the most interesting bunch of responses the quiz has had, with more wrong answers than right ones. The most common guess was The Fearless Vampire Hunters-- people recognized Polanski but thought Deneueve was Sharon Tate. (It made me realize how much they did look alike. And like Carol Lynley!) So congratulations to those who got it: Wayne Palmer, Jen McCabe, E. Yarber, Corey Anderson, and Hank Parmer. Good to hear from everybody else, too, especially Tim McDonough, whose wild guess The Vendors is now at the top of my list of movies to track down.

Posted by Steve Monaco at January 16, 2006 1:17 AM

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