by Jason Adams
Oh, Repulsion! Prescient, precious Repulsion! How could you have known that one day we'd all every last one of us be boarding up our doors and dreaming about probing walls of man hands every night? ... Just me? Watching Repulsion for the umpteenth time what immediately struck me this week, after having lost track of the time indoors myself, was its soundtrack -- the diegetic bird song, distant people playing and chit-chatting through the windows, the incessant clanging of trolley bells that slip in and out of some sort of wailing, panting kazoo cry whenever Carol (Catherine Deneuve) turns her inner heat up...
Oh, Carol.
Never have I felt closer to Carol, watching the cracks with curiosity form across sidewalks and then her walls -- if this movie was in color you know there'd be some yellow wallpaper somewhere -- and ceilings; her angst taking violent shape, rattling her zoo cage. One second she stares intently toward seeming nothingness, the next she paces back and forth like an animal, pent up, prepared to pounce should any person -- make that any man -- come a'callin', shaking bread crumbs and cornmeal in her face.
And yet the men, they keep a'coming. She is a vision, after all -- white shift, a circumference of blonde sunlight encircling her small still features, suppliant as a saint. At least until you get too close. What struck me about Deneuve this time through was the way she plays those moments when her tormentors slash victims do cross that line, sticking their grubby fingers through that invisible shield, the last of her several barriers, demanding she snap back. It's somehow at once automaton and rabid -- she perches Carol on a precipice of indifference and frenzy. It's like the scene in The Stepford Wives where Paula Prentiss post-roboticization goes all in on her teacups. It's just a thing that must be done, this madness. A wind-up and a swing, a wind-up and a swing, all in the name of some silence.
