Think, if you can, to the film that most successfully embodies the abstract perception of madness. Perhaps Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ or ‘Mulholland Drive’ might come to mind; the demented ‘Ichi the Killer’; or Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’. Chances are that you will never have seen a film quite so unhinged and unsettling as ‘Possession’, the 1981 Andrzej Zulawski film that was notoriously added to the Video Nasties List of banned films; an extraordinary knee-jerk response to an arthouse film that quite literally defies effective categorization or easy explanation.
I remember tracking the film down after hearing about it through the online blog of film critic Mark Kermode. My first viewing was as utterly arresting, baffling and horrifying as I dearly hoped it would be, and succeeded in redefining all my own perceptions of film madness. I’ve since seen the film about 4 or 5 times and still its overall impact remains undiminished; its mystery still remains shrouded in the face of yet more questions being raised.
Ostensibly classified as a ‘psychological horror’, this attempt to impose a strict label can only fail to do justice to the multifarious levels on which it can be analysed. The film works as an allegory for the disintegration of a relationship; indeed, Zulawski wrote the film amidst the turmoil and anguish of his own divorce. However, the film cartwheels away into tangents regarding sinister conspiracy plots, a sordid love triangle, grotesque ‘body horror’ and doppelganger existentialism.
The main thing to draw attention to is just how infernally high-octane a level the film is cranked up to. The performances of the lead actors – Sam Neill as Mark, and the astonishingly beautiful Isabelle Adjani as Anna, not to mention Heinz Bennent as the ludicrous love rival – are delivered at a pitch that is at once demented and fundamentally disorientating. They deliver dialogue that is so leftfield that you are consistently side-swiped (one great example is during a dispute early on in the film, Mark proceeds to slap Anna repeatedly across the face crying “do you know what this is for?! The lies!”, to which Anna’s penetratingly audacious response is “then you must add much more.”)
Adjani herself gives one of the most mind-bending performances I think I’ve ever seen from an actor; hyper-ventilating and self-destructive in one scene, suave and seductive in the next, innocent and puritan whilst playing Helen the school teacher and ‘perfect ideal’ to which Mark can’t help but be attracted. The zenith of all this hysteria culminates with the subway ‘miscarriage’ scene, a 3-4 minute holocaust of a performance that I challenge anyone to sit through without their sensibilities splintering into confused disarray.
Aside from the shriekingly-intense performances, and the more shocking Cronenberg-esque ‘creature’ sequences, Zulawski utilises a vast array of innovative and daring techniques and cinematography in order to orchestrate and maintain such a feverish level of insanity. Even after 4 or 5 viewings I’m still unconvinced as to the strictly linear nature of the narrative; some scenes appear to offer more logic if shuffled into an alternative chronology. Almost every scene is cut with irregular harshness, there are certainly no comforting edits or easy transitions. Even the score – suitably schizophrenic and sinister electronica by Andrzej Korzynski – is hacked bluntly away as scenes change. This has a relentlessly jarring impression on the viewer, perpetually dislodging them from any notion of familiar cinematic or narrative grounding, maintaining an aura of disjointed unease.
The East German locations play a pivotal role in embedding an alien, almost dystopian atmosphere; the generic, plattenbau terrace blocks and open municipal spaces all appear to be deserted and devoid of other people. The foreboding Berlin Wall plays a ubiquitous symbolic role running through the dark heart of the film, emblematic of the conflict and the insuperable barriers that have been erected between Mark and Anna that they can do nothing to effectively resolve.
Of equal importance is Zulawski’s endlessly inventive camerawork and direction. In Mark’s interview with a board of mysterious businessmen, the camera completes a 360-degree circumference of the expansive room; disorienting angles and tracking shots permeate through, each helping to augment one masterful scene after another.
Overall though, it is the sheer sense of the bizarre and surreal that gives the film its tortuous strain of insanity. Characters collapse or dissolve into paroxysms at random; having just had a violent row with Anna and caused a traffic accident, Mark inexplicably starts playing football with a gang of children.
The closest literary comparison that I can think of in terms of inflecting narrative synergistically with an air of freewheeling madness, is William S. Burrough’s ‘Naked Lunch’. Certainly, as an aspiring writer of the surreal, I would someday love to try and write a book in the same hysterical and disturbing dialectics of ‘Possession’; a disgraceful carnival of a film that I would recommend to anyone, purely as a means of realigning the contour lines of their cinematic topography that (in the era of superhero epics and CGI Hollywood blockbusters), perhaps sit far too comfortably.
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