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DVD Repulsion
Roman Polanski was still a newcomer to the world of cinema when he unleashed this unforgettable exercise in skin-crawling terror. Repulsion was the Polish director's first film in English, but that hardly mattered: much of the movie is as wordless (and as weird) as the silent Nosferatu. The young Catherine Deneuve plays a Belgian girl stranded in '60s London, a shy beauty with no social skills. When her sister leaves their shared flat, Deneuve goes gradually, quietly, completely mad. Her world becomes Polanski's paintbox, as the devilish director distorts reality via a series of surrealistic touches (grasping hands that protrude from elastic walls) and out-and-out murderous horror. Very few films cast the kind of eerie spell that this 1965 classic achieves, and it clearly points the way toward Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. As with most of the director's work, what is unsettling is not the overt violence, but the terrifying sense of emptiness and isolation, and the boiling unease inside one's own mind. --Robert Horton
This is, indeed, a "stopgap" release of sorts, especially when one considers that other regions worldwide have released this film in packages that seem "more professional" somehow, and do it more justice. However, by purchasing this DVD, you *can* own the film, which is what I did. I find this movie one of the most fascinating studies of madness ever, and riveting although half or more of the film deals with a single character, spending time alone. Again, riveting.
Polanski's nightmare of claustrophobic terror.
Roman Polanski's first film in the West is, in my opinion, his best to date. When "Repulsion" was released it was considered by many--including young women who related to the sexually-repressed Carol (Catherine Deneuve) and her dangerous fantasies--to be more frightening than "Psycho". Today, it seems more unnerving than terrifying--although viewers still jump when they see the fantasy man's reflection in the mirror. Yet it remains fascinating as an exotic psychological thriller; an enigmatic portrait of a woman who sinks into madness; and an early look into the macabre mind of Polanski.
Deneuve is convincing as the lonely, unformed young woman who is drifting into insanity, whose mind is deteriorating while the food around her rots. She gets to laugh and smile only once in the film. At other times her Carol is withdrawn, frightened, guilty (her violent nightmares reflect that she wants to be punished for her sexual desires). She just pulls into herself, to where she can't be reached. It may all be very spooky, but Carol doesn't represent evil. Polanski treats her extremely sympathetically. Interestingly, even male viewers like me identify with Deneuve rather than with her male victims, whereas while watching "Psycho", everyone identifies with the psychotic's victims. Carol's hallucinations/nightmares are full of erotic images--it's a very sexy film--but Polanski doesn't want us to become aroused when she is raped and ravaged by her imagined male intruders. Significantly, we are disturbed by the attacks because we know Carol is suffering without achieving any kind of sexual satisfaction or liberation. We realize that she can't cope with the sexual confusion.
Most viewers and critics were annoyed because they believed Polanski should have explained the reasons for Carol's breakdown. Well he does. I'm certainly not going to give anything away but, as with the director's later films "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown", anyone who leaves his seat, even for an instant, risks missing a new turn in the twisting story.
The mad have always fascinated artists. Painters have tried to depict their mystery through their physiognomy, the greatest dramatists and novelists have been challenged by the subject, and filmmakers have been attracted more frequently to the picturesque visions and melodramatic actions of the insane. There have been films which handled the relationship of society and mental illness in greater depth, but very few images of madness stay as vibrant in the memory as "Repulsion". [filmfactsman]
5 Star Film, a Classic. And now, about the DVD...
... don't fret.
If you have a multi-region DVD you can get the British R-2 DVD (by Anchor Bay, no less!) which was made of the transfer of the Criterion Laserdisc. Includes some nifty extras and the original commentary track of Polanski v. Deneuve.
So, yes, it's Pal, and it's a wee bit more expensive, but it's the best way to see this creepy classic the way it deserves in its 40th anniversary.
So, forget about this sub-par release and tackle it before it goes OOP.
And if you are a Polanski fan, you should try to get the glorious ROMAN POLANSKI BOX SET, which includes Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, Knife in the Water and the shorts he made in Poland. A must for fans.
After the triumph of Chinatown, Roman Polanski's The Tenant marked an unsettling return to the horrifying psychodrama of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. As in those previous films, Polanski explores a descent into madness with subtle, deliberate pacing and keen attention to accumulating details. Cannily casting himself in the title role, Polanski plays the mild-mannered occupant of a Parisian flat previously rented by a woman who committed suicide by leaping from her upper-floor balcony. The woman's leftover belongings and the harsh attitudes of disapproving neighbors (including Melvin Douglas and Shelley Winters) begin to grate on the new tenant's psyche; his paranoia shifts from simmering anxiety to full-blown psychosis, until fate itself seems to run in a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Roman Polanski - Isabelle Adjani - Melvyn Douglas Director(s): Roman Polanski DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A young Paris housewife, Séverine, grows bored with her stable husband. When she learns of the presence of a high-class brothel in her neighborhood, she quietly goes to work there--but only during the day, until five o'clock in the afternoon. This sublime 1967 film is one of the latter-day masterpieces of the Spanish-born director Luis Buñuel, whose career forms one of the greatest and boldest arcs in cinema. By the time of Belle de jour, Buñuel had become almost completely deadpan in his style, which not only leaves the motivation of Séverine a mystery (despite a few flashbacks to degradations of her youth), but also casts the entire plot in doubt. An old surrealist from the 1920s (when his first classic, Un chien andalou, was made in... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Catherine Deneuve - Jean Sorel Director(s): Luis Buñuel DVD Release Date: Released the 22 January 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Un Chien Andalou remains a startling artifact suggesting ways in which film can express the subconscious. The result of Luis Bunuel's collaboration with Salvador Dali, the 17-minute, 1929 film was designed expressly to shock and provoke. Opening with the canonical eyeball-slashing sequence and divided into baffling "chapters", this is a work of art obsessed with religion, lust, decay, violence, and death. Un Chien Andalou isn't simply one of the great works of the surrealist movement, but a segment of cinematic DNA that irrevocably altered the aesthetics of film. In its tangled corridors you find the seeds to the disappearing-mouth bit in The Matrix, the carcasses strewn through Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and pretty much the entire oeuvre of David... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Simone Mareuil - Pierre Batcheff Director(s): Luis Buñuel DVD Release Date: Released the 28 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Something like a perfect artistic union is achieved in the major components of Paris, Texas: the twang of Ry Cooder's guitar, the lonely light of Robbie Muller's camera, the craggy landscape of Harry Dean Stanton's face. In his greatest role, longtime character actor Stanton plays a man brought back to his old life after wandering in the desert (or somewhere) for four years. He has a 7-year-old son to get to know, and his wife has gone missing. The material is much in the wanderlust spirit of director Wim Wenders, working from a script by Sam Shepard and L.M. Kit Carson. If the long climactic conversation between Stanton and Nastassja Kinski renders the movie uneven and slightly inscrutable, it's hard to think of a more fitting ending--and besides, the achingly empty American... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Harry Dean Stanton - Nastassja Kinski - Dean Stockwell Director(s): Wim Wenders DVD Release Date: Released the 14 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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