Imagine Bergman's 'Scenes From a Marriage' filmed by Dario Argento using Kubrick's 'Shining' steadicam. I can't pretend to have actually UNDERSTOOD this intellectually rigorous horror film, but I do know that it is arguably the most beautiful film of the 1980s, that ugliest of cinematic decades.
The chief source of this beauty is Zulawski's camerawork, unsettling, spacious, constantly mobile, it achieves the kind of elaborate shots you normally expect with cumbersome, expensive equipment with the nimbleness of a handheld camera. Static scenes in repetitive milieux are subjected to awesomely complex movements, as the camera encircles, tracks, reveals, blocks, opens up space, creating a narrative that never stands still, offering us different, usually startling viewpoints within the one scene.
What is most remarkable is its transformation of scale - the film is set in Cold-War Berlin, a famously constricted city; the plot takes place mostly in inhumanly modern apartments or on streets, and yet the sense of size, scale, space is as monumental as a Fordian Western. This is apt for characters who are simultaneously confined and alienated by their environment. Even scenes of flamboyant repulsiveness, the puling monster mounting Isabella Adjani, Mark's lavatorial dispatch of Heinrich, have a clarity of composition that is simply breathtaking.
Unlike most horror films, which open with images of normality against which to measure the transgression of terror, 'Possession' hurls us into its relentless unpleasantness in medias res. Zulawski opens at full speed and never lets up. Mark in his car looks out at a city he hasn't seen for some time as if it is an alien land, full of troubling images, including an iron cross. Anna rushes to meet him. We assume they are husband and wife, reuniting, but their talk if full of exasperated dislocation. Mark has apparently come home too early. They have a son; after making love, their post-coital talk is full of Antonionian misunderstanding, uncertainty, alienation, cruelty.
These scenes create the mood of the whole film. 'Possession' is shot in English with a French lead by a Polish director. The dialogue has a stilted quality, like a translation from some lost original; this sense of not-quite-rightness extends to the acting, and the scenes themselves, which seem too mannered, too abrupt, too stylised to seem natural. This sense of the drama being at one remove from some original 'reality' is perfect for a film about alienation - people alienated from themselves, each other, their marriage, their home, even their identity.
The horror that constitutes the film obviously has its roots in the female hysteria (one scene in a subway, remembered by Anna, has her miscarry, as she pours out blood and milk, the essence of her femaleness spilling from her; the toilet scene between Heinrich and Mark has a gynaecological terror similar to Argento's 'Suspiria') and male bestiality that cannot be hidden by affluent modernity, but this, on its most basic level, is a harrowing portrait of a failed marriage, horribly truthful to anyone who has even rejoiced in that institution.
All the while we are constantly reminded of the contemporary political reality - Mark's espionage (or is he an assassin?) activities; the wired Berlin wall with its faceless surveillance guards (a divided city, a divided marriage, literally divided people, the * and the madonna). The film has a lot of talk about faith, chance, God, good and evil, but its true power is recognisably more mundane, yet more unaccountably wrenching than that. One should not overlook the comic sense that flickers through the film, the exaggeration of scenes by prolonging them (the restaurant scene), and the Franju-like waltz-of-death music.
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