I Would Like to See It: Repulsion

How do you talk about a movie with such insight into sexual predation when its creator is himself a sexual predator? Roman Polanski’s Repulsion mines even closer to the lode of its director’s real-life behavior than the better-known Rosemary’s Baby, a case not of staggering unselfawareness, or even strictly of predator camouflage, but of the limits of insight in the context of art. Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That?, a landmark psychosocial text, discusses “the highly-therapized abuser” in terms useful to an analysis of Polanski’s work, casting abusive men with insight gleaned through self-improvement of the type sought in talk therapy as accomplished, integrated, content, and fundamentally unchanged. Polanski’s penetrating insight into why men like him do what they do, and what it’s like for women to live in the world those urges and patterns of behavior create, amount, in the context of his own life, to so much intellectual showing off.

But from that exhibition of his own intelligence and faux-empathy comes a truly terrifying film, one where the faces of men are stretched and smeared by mirrors and the fisheye glass of peepholes, where the fabric of the home itself as a psychological archetype is physically interwoven with male violence, where domestic spaces yawn vast and alien around the fragile bodies of women. You’d have to range far and wide to find anything as scary as the sight of a bedroom door thumping against the wardrobe blocking it, or the dirty-faced spectral attacker who manifests repeatedly in Carol’s (a young, then-unknown Catherine Deneuve) bed. The film is infested with these enigmatic images of violence, evocative in complex and unsettling ways of the violence men do to women.

Of particular interest is a family photo depicting Carol, her sister, and two men — one of whom may be their father. The prepubescent Carol looks stricken, her gaze locked on one of the men. The film closes on this image, suggesting it as the childhood fountainhead from which Carol’s psychosis springs. Did her father molest her? The question is perhaps more illustrative than any potential answer. The line connects, stretching from the darkness of the past to the hallucinatory violence of the present, whether we can see its point of origin or not. That in that darkness at the other end waits Polanski himself, smugly content in his own insight into the minds of the defenseless girls on whom he has spent his life preying, only makes Repulsion that much harder to endure. It’s impossible to watch the film without the faces of Samantha Geimer, Renate Langer, Marianne Barnard, and all the others he attacked swimming in your peripheral vision, simultaneously concealed and given catharsis by a man who won awards for telling us it’s ugly when you break a woman.