There’s a pantheon of screen performances that are outrageous. It dates back to silent era. It has room for everyone, from a naked Lon Chaney to a Nicolas Cage covered in bees. In the center of this Hall of Fame, however, sits a French actress, her pale blue eyes widened, her head tilted and her mouth opened as if she’s about to scream. The rest are in awe of her, and give her a wide berth; she appears to be a woman not on the verge of a nervous breakdown but deep into an-already-in-progress one. You could point to a number of her exquisitely extravagant turns over the years regarding why she’s gained entry to this elite club, but it’s one role in particular that’s awarded her pride of place.
The character’s name is Anna. She lives in Berlin, still divided with her son. Her husband, Mark, has just returned from an assignment — something to do with the intelligence community. They are not getting along. They are about to break up in the most shocking way possible, as soon as we meet them.
After Anna confessed to having a lover, and has fought bitterly against her spouse, she moves into her own apartment and may have even murdered several people. She then enters a subway station. Her panting is heavy, even though she’s only ridden an escalator up one floor. Next, the maniacal laughter follows. Soon Anna is wandering along a deserted walkway and bouncing off of the stone walls. And now the screaming starts — deafening, guttural, primal shrieks. Her body is shaking, and she continues to turn around. These spasms are followed by Anna rolling around the wet corridor’s floors, writhing in agony. Don’t just take our word for it: This three-minute sequence isn’t so much a hysterical fit as a one-woman Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. And that’s BeforeBlood and milky white goo started to pour out of her veins.
It was released in 1981, and immediately caused a stir at Cannes after its first screening. Possession is an intense, unshakable, what-the-fuck-did-I-just-watch movie from the get-go — that subway scene is simply the apex of its insanity, and proof that Isabelle Adjani is nothing if not extremely committed to her craft. A Kramer vs Kramer for cinematic extremists, it’s a divorce movie that translates the bitterness and resentments of one couple into a body-horror nightmare; it’s not surprising to learn that the man behind this madness, Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski, had acrimoniously split up with his wife before making it. It’s just sociopolitical frosting that the film takes place in a German capital still at war. And while it may be a sick joke for Metrograph Pictures to release its jaw-droppingly beautiful 4K restoration across the nation at a moment in which so many of us have long been cooped up, nerve-frayed and come within spitting distance of our own psychic meltdowns, it’s also an appropriate time to dive back into a true look into the abyss. You can stream the film here. Metrograph’s site(Until October 31st. Suddenly, Adjani’s transit-tunnel freakout seems way, way too relatable.
You can’t even say that the French star’s outrageously expressive, if not downright Expressionistic, performance here is the only one jumping the rails of realism here — your money is originally on Sam Neill as the primary scenery-chewer, playing a husband adept at poking wounds and escalating arguments. He discovers that his wife is not faithful to him and confronts her in a cafe. After that, he trashes the establishment before being confronted by waitstaff. The competition gets stiffer when we later meet Anna’s lover, a German man named Heinrich, who shows up at Mark’s apartment looking for her and then engages in what could be a pantomime of a drunk caught in a storm or an impromptu modern-dance piece. (He gets one of the movie’s best lines, too: “There is nothing to fear except God. [uncomfortably long pause] Whatever that means to you.”) Taking a page out of playwright Jerzy Grotowski’s book of tricks, Zulawski allegedly hypnotized his performers and put them into a fugue state before shooting certain scenes, the better to access their characters’ inner torment. These results speak for themselves, sometimes loudly, and sometimes incomprehensibly.
But it was Adjani who took to this unusually Method-y method of directing with a level of dedication bordering on religious devotion, and her no-filters answer to this challenge is what’s given PossessionIt has the current reputation. At first, she attempts to be the voice behind reason. She tells her spouse, insistently, that long absences from the job had created a void, and that the son would suffer. That their marriage is loveless, and that the parting is sweet but the best option. He disagrees vehemently. Anna cracks a bit, but Adjani demonstrates how tiny fractures can eventually lead to the collapse of entire foundations. The title makes you think you’re walking into an Exorcist knock-off; by the end, you realize it’s a concise description of its star’s process.
Her willingness to go there — where Possession‘s actual “there” is — earned her a Best Actress award at Cannes and the French equivalent of an Oscar. It also, according to Zulawski, caused Adjani to have an actual breakdown, and that she attempted to slash her wrists after seeing the finished result. Thankfully, she recovered, and would find a way to continue doing equally this-performance-goes-to-11 work for another decade; namedrop 1988’S Camille Claudel, a biopic about the 19th century French sculptor, and the first (and possibly only) thing you think of is Adjani screaming her lover Rodin’s name in the rain at full-lung capacity for close to a minute.
Metrograph Pictures
After they physically attack each other and stumble out into the street, Anna’s mouth smeared with blood, the movie seems to shift into an entirely different register. From this point on, slightly before the film’s halfway mark, Zulawski starts throwing a number of other disparate elements into their paths. Self-harming electric carving knives are used. Private detective is killed. Both AnnaAnd Mark get their own doppelgängers. Some 40 years later, it’s still impossible to tell whether the tentacled creature, courtesy of Alien and E.T.‘s special effects guru Carlo Rambaldi, is a real manifestation of Anna’stoic or simply a product of a warped mind. We can regrettably confirm, however, that’s Zulawski’s rumored pitch to an American producer that PossessionIt was partly about “a woman who fucks an octopus” wasn’t just crude ballyhoo designed to sell the film.
These more psychotronic elements, along with the copious amount of Caro syrup that get spilled, immediately got Zulawski’s cinematic equivalent of Blood on the Tracks — now with actual blood! On actual tracks! — labeled as a horror gorefest. France praised it for its unhinged art. Britain, however, condemned it as a public danger in the early 1980s. “Video Nasties” scare, and an edit from an American distributor that cut the director’s two-hour vision down to 81 minutes would be as vicious and brutal as anything in the film. The full version eventually started making the rounds around 2012, and this new restoration only confirms that it deserves to be considered a first-rate portrait of marital discord taken to its logical mutually-assured-destruction conclusion. If Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac really wanted to show their acting skills, they would have remade the film and not. Scenes from a Wedding)
Except It isn’t the operatic physical violence that we witness happening in Possession that’s so unnerving. It’s the psychic violence that people inflict on each other when a union is rendered asunder — the kind that makes someone going ballistic in a subway station seem tame by comparison — that makes this movie feel so painful, and so precise in terms of pushing hard on your pressure points. There’s never been a better time to catch up with this truly disturbing look at 360-degree disintegration. You don’t like it?