This is the second essay in a series of pieces for an imagined series of screenings to complement Parasite. The first was Chameleon Street, the second Harry He’s Here to Help. the third The Servant. In this week’s essay, I look at Possession, about what happens when something unwanted comes to stay in your home.
I very rarely cry and I sit in envy of those who find it easy, able to find some way to suggest the roiling underneath. There are times when emotions become grand inside us, when their inescapability seems to create a thicker air, where we feel our mood could blacken milk at a glance or blood may leak from our pores. The language of emotions seeks to externalise them, often violently: ‘looks that kill’, ‘choking on tears’. Breaking through our solipsism, it’s often a surprise to find that our inner life doesn’t punctuate the outer world in the least. If we put a filmmaker like Ozu Yasujiro at one end of a spectrum – emotions repressed far enough that we are forced to attune ourselves to a new sensitivity, one that might serve us well in life – then Andrezj Zuławski sits at its other end, emotions so present they create new, monstrous life.
Possession is a bag of oddments. Set in West Berlin at the tail end of the Cold War, it’s directed by a Pole and stars a New Zealander and a French woman (as well as one of Fassbinder’s stock company in the shape of Margit Carstensen). It’s both an intense character drama and a horrific, wallclimbing tale of doppelgangers, self-mutilation and tentacled monstrosities. Constantly wandering between fish and fowl, yet rarely to its detriment, it’s a sadistic and masochistic story of the dissolution of a marriage, based directly on the end of Zuławski marriage to actor Małgorzata Braunek (star of many of his early features).
So little of filmmaking is strictly personal. Compared with a novel or a song, the dilution a film goes through on its route to completion is intense, given the number of people a filmmaker must convince to participate in their folie. Mostly this is to a film’s benefit. Film is a mass medium and having the consensus of others means that what you’re looking to say extends beyond you and a coterie of your friends. Yet Possession seems mired in a particular personal pain, written in a strangulation of grief. Much of the latter third of the film is rendered obscure by self-flagellation. Possession’s saving grace as a monumental tribute to the pain of break ups is that it’s not an edifice to male pain, but to the horror and cruelty any two people put each other through given half a chance.
Writing a synopsis of Possession only reveals half of its plot. There are sections of the film where only a recourse to emotional truth rather than narrative sequence makes sense. Whole portions of the run time that are dedicated to characters entering rooms and doing their level best to scream louder, wreak more chaos and topple ever larger items – clothing, chairs, eventually whole cars – eventually to find an objective correlative to their inner anguish. Nevertheless, the main spine of the story is a love triangle. Mark (Sam Neill) returns from a long mission abroad for a mysterious agency to his wife and child. While they have both been unfaithful in the interim, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) sees her infidelity as the route out of the relationship. Mark confronts his rival Heinrich (Heinz Bennett), the Buddha of Brandenberg, his snake-like hips consistently ridden by a shirt unbuttoned to the waist. However, Mark soon learns that Anna has absconded but now with Heinrich. Mark’s private investigator tracks Anna to a derelict flat on Sebastianstraße, where Anna is in an uncanny flatshare with something putrid and tentacled that writhes on a mattress, awaiting flesh. What follows is a series of encounters with the beast, a pristine nunlike doppelganger of Anna, Mark’s shadowy employers, Heinrich’s gnomic mother and a Honda motorcycle gliding by its own whims rather than its rider through the streets of Berlin.
Possession is one of a vanishingly small number of psychologically convincing dramas that take the risk of dancing into the ridiculous by incorporating the supernatural into everyday drama. There’s every reason – financial, practical, creatively – to keep your feet on terra firma. If you can write dialogue at the level of Before Sunrise, why add the stirring of an ancient evil to that and alienate the white middle class audience who mostly steer well clear of horror (the answer is that then it would be Spring and it would be terrific)? Possession, like Takashi Miike’s Audition is a film that would benefit from the ‘brown paper bag’ treatment where any details about what was to follow, generically or otherwise, were blinkered from the viewer. The arrival of the beast – which slowly transforms through various chimeras into a human replicant of Mark through acquisition of slain men’s bodies – is not a foregone conclusion, and until this point the film is dealing in emotional extremity but not the supernatural. What we’ve seen so far – characters wearing the same clothes day after day to grimier and grimier results, churning chaos of tossed belongings, a meat grinder used by both partners to self-harm, a hotel stay that makes Martin Sheen’s Apocalypse Now Saigon prologue lodgings look like a Torquay Travelodge – could have steered back towards the terrestrial.
It’s the attempt to literalise the scale of emotional disorder that urges Zuławski to launch himself beyond the bounds of the real. Possession’s scale of feeling risks at times derailing the story. Case in point: the infamous subway scene, where Anna flails, possessed by a monstrous miscarriage, overcome from a profusion of blood and slime that leaks not from orifices but from her being. Unsubstantiated rumours abound that this film took the actors to the brink of sanity. Whether these rumours are true, they seem to describe the expansion of the acting beyond the bounds of mere performance. The scene, presented outside of narrative order and without precedent, acts like a cameo locket of pain. Throughout the film, there’s a sense of the actors being offered free reign to channel something beyond their characters. At times, especially in its final third, this means that scenes become undissolved and showcases for acting ‘choices’.
At its best though, the scenes conform to Antoin Artaud’s definition of the power of the art of cruelty (as quoted in Maggie Nelson’s book of the same name):
the appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the blackness, in the sense of that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue.
There’s an argument to be made that Zulawski’s metaphor is distasteful, grandiose. The Cold War as a metaphor for interpersonal conflict? Self-mutilation as a literalisation of internal pain? While I have an affection for works of art like Sherman’s March or Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor that parallel the global moments (like the American Civil War) with fleeting romantic disappointment, there’s always a wry sense of the silliness of the comparison, a minimising self-soothing by way of the ridiculousness of the comparison. Zuławski risks tipping into the same territory as Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ here (as dissected so forensically by Jacqueline Rose), by suggesting that his pain exists above the pain of global conflict, the metaphor reversed. At other points drawing on Christ’s suffering as comparable, Possession threatens often to turn to camp in its strategy of emotional aggrandisement.
Yet it’s instructive to look at another story of monstrous female transformation to compare with Zuławski’s approach. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan similarly is a horror-inflected drama where reality quickly is displaced, a story of self-immolation in pursuit of becoming something else. The difference in their approach is their fetishisation of female pain. Where Aronofsky uses the surreal to focus and deepen female pain, Zuławski uses the fantastic to externalise the pain to its protagonists. Unlike Aronofosky (who time and again is content to agree with Edgar Allen Poe that ‘the death... of a beautiful woman... is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’), after a certain point Zuławski uses the film’s creatures to become punching bags for the actors, to let their worst and best imaginings sit outside them rather than be visited on their own bodies. As Possession reaches its climax, a doppelganger of Mark appears, the final version of the slathering creature we’ve seen up to this point. With unnaturally green eyes, he is joined by an alternate version of Anna, called Helen. Both of these bodies are perfected versions of the couple. Through their pain they see each other as the worst possible version of each other; it’s only natural that its alternate, serene, nun-like, messianiac should show up. Aronofosky sees self-destruction as the entry price for greatness, his black swan dancing a perfect death dance; Zulawski’s vision admits suffering for both man and woman. As both lovers take the same blade and cut each other, we know that this pain serves no purpose, creates nothing new and is inflicted against each other to no end.
Recommendations
If you haven’t seen Charles Burnett’s superb Killer of Sheep, the fine people at Milestone films have that and many others on their VOD channel. A poetic realist document of black life in LA’s Watts neighbourhood, it’s poignant and beautiful, without using black lives as a metaphor for something beyond them. Some more recommendations for their channel over here.
If you’re looking to go somewhere else, even briefly, Sandrine Veysset’s Will It Snow for Christmas? (available on disc via the BFI) is a sun-drenched but not rose-tinted view of childhood and motherhood, as one woman struggles to keep a farm afloat in Southern France.
Icelandic eco-lark Woman at War is now on MUBI. Managing to pose huge questions with a light touch, it’s also a stunning trip into the Icelandic landscape in the company of a middle-aged woman ablaze with the visionary fire of youth.
This fundraiser for Black Minds Matter helps support black people to access mental health services.