128. Possession

Song - Margherita (Marco Borsato)

Movie: Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

I am not the greatest fan of this, but it is further evidence of how limp and full of shit The Shape of Water was. Zulawski, until the end, doesn't reveal what the strange creature is, what its purpose is, why Anna is so invested in it, and whether the creature is even part of the film's reality or of some surrealist dreamscape. And he never bothers to make clear how Anna actually comes in possession of the creature. Is it made out of the men she kills? Is it the direct product of her insanity? Did it just happen to live in the abandoned apartment now inhabited by Anna? None of these questions are answered, and it makes the whole film just more unsettling.

In the end, the whole doppelganger symbolism, plays a bit too much like a trite and not fully realized metaphor about divided Berlin/Germany/Europe - Mark lives next to the Berlin Wall, the film reminds us by periodically returning to an image of two guards seen from Mark's window. Still, and I don't know if this is because of hindsight, it manages to evoke an atmosphere and mood of impending change. We see graffiti asking for the wall to come down, while on the soundtrack we hear the kind of futuristic electro/techno music that has now become a marker of nostalgia for the restless spirit of 70's/80's Europe in general, and Berlin in particular.

Most of the film's mood though is shaped by the utterly manic acting of Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, playing Mark and Anna, a husband and wife (with a kid) who absolutely need to break up and absolutely cannot live without each other. Which drives them to insanity. I think at times Zulawski relies a bit too much on their intense acting; after the umpteenth time Anna returns home and has a fight with Mark, you get a little annoyed that Zulawski repeats himself and doesn't do something more or different to drive the story/characters forward or to deepen the film up a bit more. Especially, because when he does so, the film really does reach another level. A scene in which Mark watches a video recording, mysteriously delivered to his front door, of Anna pushing one of her ballet students to the breaking point is almost as distressing as the scenes involving the bizarre creature, certainly so when Anna suddenly breaks the fourth wall.

All of this doesn't mean that Zulawski is wrong to focus so much on Neill and Adjani's performances. They are ridiculously impressive and earn the film its title. They really do act as if they are possessed by demons that make them neither understand each other nor themselves. When they fight each other they do so with utter desperation and a seemingly total abandonment of their rational faculties. And their anger and despair only grow as they barely seem to understand where their emotions come from. The showstopper sequence, set in the Berlin metro, belongs to Adjani who does things with her body that seem almost impossible. The scene is basically only her in a grey tunnel, losing her mind, yet she is so utterly convincing and frightening, it genuinely makes you nauseous. And that's even before it becomes really gory and bloody.