the male gaze
by
Douglas Messerli
Roman
Polanski and Gérard Brach (screenplay), Roman Polanski (director) Repulsion / 1965
It’s
rather strange to think that Roman Polanski’s second feature film, Repulsion, is in some ways a
pre-feminist work—particularly given the many claims of the director’s abuse of
women over the years. One might even describe this 1965 as an early testament
to the current #METOO movement.
The central figure of this film, Carole
Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve), who works as a
manicurist, lives with her sister in a somewhat upscale, if dowdily furbished
Battersea (London) apartment, even while they apparently have a difficult time paying
their monthly rent. Born in Belgium, the sisters
could not be more different. Hélène,
a slightly frowsy woman which might have been found in the works of the British
“angry young man” playwrights, gets her part of the rent mostly by turning
tricks with her lover Michael (a lecherous Ian Hendry), whom she attempt to by
fixing a rabbit dinner early in the film, a meal interrupted by Michael’s
determination to eat out before returning back to her apartment for night of a
noisy sex, which deeply disturbs Carole’s attempts to sleep.
The beautiful Carole, on the other hand,
is dreamy and detached, clearly afraid of any male companionship, but almost
equally terrified of making close contact with her women colleagues. Given
Polanski’s example of the clientele of Madame Denise’s salon—Mrs. Rendelsham
(Monica Merlin) who begins the film as a kind of mummy-like doyenne receiving a
facial while Carole works upon her nails, and the daily pains of male
companionship recounted by her salon assistant—we can well comprehend her
fears. And, later, we recognize through a brief inter-clip that she may have
been raped by her father or another older man.
Carole’s beauty, however, draws men to
her, including street workers who give her a nod and hoot and a far more
respectable and gentle suitor, Colin (John Fraser), who attempts to get her to
go out on date, without much success. Colin, however, is befriended by
bar-buddies who talk about women as trophies, and when he has no success with
the off-putting blonde, is egged-on to make a more direct attack.
Most of the men in this film, moreover,
are far more like the partying sex-fiend Michael than the kinder and handsome
Colin, and we immediately perceive why, particularly given her background,
Carole wants no contact. Yet we also perceive that the shy and distant beauty
is attracted to Colin and even to the far more bestial Michael, at one point
retrieving his underwear and putting them to her face, while also being
disgusted by the fact that he has stashed his razor and toothbrush in her bathroom
water glass.
All those who encounter her, however, do know
that there is something wrong with this woman, Michael even suggesting, in
passing, that she needs to seek help. And it doesn’t improve the situation that
the sisters’ apartment faces a kind of Catholic cloister, whose nuns are
constantly called back to prayer with a bell. The overbearing images of this
film set a background to the young beauty’s gradual breakdown.
Throughout the film, moreover, Carole
hardly ever eats. She can hardly bring herself to taste her fish and chips when
she meets Colin, and her evening dinner, that unforgettable rabbit which keeps
appearing throughout the film and winds up even in her pursue, is never cooked.
Throughout the film, she seems to be unable to consume anything except coffee,
and even that seems to be a kind Hitchcockian terror in the manner of the milk
that Cary Grant fetches up for his wife, played by Joan Fontaine in Suspicion. Everything gets worse when
her sister retreats to Italy with her pay-for lover for what was to have been
an overnight visit but extends into several days. She wants to see, quite
symbolically, the “leaning tower of Pisa,” as if she personally identifies with
its gravitational pull to the lower earth.
If nothing else, the nearly starved
Carole goes into a kind of hungry trance—hungry for all those things she dares
not touch: food, male companionship, and female friendship. Given those terms,
is it any wonder that her world literally “cracks up,” sidewalk splinters
turning into earthquake-like fissures in the walls, further terrifying the
already terrified woman who simply wants to be left alone instead of being, as
Colin attempts after being goaded on by his bar-room friends, a sexual object
for his pleasure. In our heroine’s mental breakdown, male hands reach out for
her even through the walls. There is no escape here from the male gaze—or in
Polanski’s version, the “male grab,” something he surely must have known about.
When Colin dares to break down her
barriers, literally played out in surrealist imagery when he breaks down the
apartment door, she responds in the only way that a strong Hitchcockian woman
can, as in the master’s Dial M for Murder,
Carole replacing that character’s scissors with a candlestick with which she
clubs her would-be suitor to death.
When the landlord (Patrick Wymark), soon
after, comes calling for the rent, she politely hands over the envelope which
her sister has left her to pay him. But when he attempts to also embrace her,
Michael’s misplaced razor is an easy solution to his would-be abuse.
It is true, Carole is now insane, or, as
the males use inappropriately describe her behavior, has become hysterical, and
in the process, loses herself entirely as surely as Blanche DuBois has lost her
sanity in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar
Named Desire; but she has, perhaps, in that very fact, regained her
integrity as a woman, freed herself finally from constant devouring of the
males in the world in which she lives.
That a true rapist could actually write
and direct this work shows me a deep comprehension of his own guilt, of his
understanding of just how terribly he later abused his female prey. Like
Hitchcock, Polanski knew what he was doing in his unwanted pressing upon the
female body, which Williams could only imagine and concoct. And that
realization is part of what makes Deneuve’s “repulsion” so very tangible and
believable, despite the film’s surrealist-like presentation of reality.
Repulsion
is a great film because it realizes the everyday horror women of having to escape
the gauntlet of the male hunters of society. Unfortunately, in that process,
even decent males suffer the for their raunchy brothers. In the end of Polanski’s
moral tale—and it is a moral despite
his most immoral personal actions—does not truly reveal which of the characters
should be the subject of the “repulsion” which he announces, the frustrated and
frightened murderer or the preying males who demanded her response. There is no
answer here without complete sexual equality and liberation.
Los Angeles,
November 16, 2018
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (November
2018).
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