Carole (Repulsion)

FEAR: BEING PREYED UPON

Picture the scene: A young woman, painfully, excruciatingly shy to the point of remaining nearly mute for most of the film, lives with her sister as a manicurist in fashionable 1960s London. She’s undoubtedly very pretty, played by the beautiful French actress Catherine Deneuve, and never fails to attract male attention, whether that’s in the form of a handsome English boy close to her age, or lecherous, much older, landlord.

Herein lies the leading lady’s motivation for why she is the way she is throughout the film: she has a debilitating aversion, or repulsion if you will, to men. There is an implication, to be discussed, at some point in Roman Polanski’s second feature-length film that Carole has good reason to be traumatized, a theme that is nightmarishly explored through dark shadows, disorienting angles and hands where they definitely should not be.

Watching this film for the first time, I must admit, I wasn’t terribly impressed, but it definitely grew on me. It felt at times like an amateur filmmaker’s “experimental” phase movie, and the long silences read less to me as thoughtful and more as though Polanski couldn’t think of any good dialogue. In fairness, Carole spends a great deal of her time in the film completely alone in her apartment, which excuses the silence to some extent, but even in this case, I felt there could have been something there, be that more ambient music, internal monologue, or even Carole talking to herself out loud, because, let’s be honest, we all do it, and it might have gone well with the theme of losing your grip on sanity.

All that being said, the last five minutes of the film won me over completely and left me nearly frozen in sudden realization of why Catherine Deneuve’s character had acted so strangely throughout the film: After Carole is found in a state of stupor by her returning sister, she is carried out of the living room, where a picture lies on the floor. As the camera zooms in, it becomes evident as a family photo, where a woman and a man smile at the camera, and a young Carole stands in the background, staring daggers into the man’s back. The last shot of the film is a disturbing but effective close up shot of her young eyes, aglow with intense hatred and fear.

This movie is, of course, not the only one to deal with the tragic and heavy theme of sexual assault and resulting trauma, but in my opinion, it is one of the best at it.