A senior theater kid at the university told a group of us back in '76 we HAD to see the film playing at the Russell House. She'd seen it for her film studies class. It was about a white woman in Paris who goes mad and thinks all men are after her.
"There's one scene where the walls reach out to grab her, " I recall her saying.
And it was free!
Needless to say, I loved Repulsion (1965) -- everything about it was wild and provocative and messed up and meaningful.
Catherine Deneuve is not just a sexually repressed young woman having a bad weekend; she is all of humanity in a paranoid, untrusting world, isolated, victimized by our own dark distrust, abandoning sanity and goodness and letting them rot as we wander about in fearful delusion.
Of course, I didn't see that then. I just saw it as strange and sophisticated, as a child would, through a glass, darkly.
But as I have matured, I see it better. Even more clearly 50 years later.
That's how life works -- if we're lucky.
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