Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Repulsion (1965)

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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.
Not familiar with art house pictures or know Polanski from Tchaikovsky at that point, I was game. Hell, that's what's great about universities! Exploring the unknown and unfamiliar. Being open to experiences. Even if we ended up not caring for it.
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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