Horror Actressing: Isabelle Adjani in "Possession" (1981)
Thursday, July 2, 2020 at 12:30PM by Jason Adams
The dissolution of a marriage rendered palpable, ectoplasmic -- Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 cult freak-out slash Cannes winner Possession was birthed mid-divorce from the director, and the labor pains are writ like arterial sprays across its every frame. It's Bergman via Jodorowsky; Scenes From a Marriage on a severe acid trip. The screen's awash in Evil Dead amounts of gunk, puss, a sparkling rainbow of ejaculatory fluids -- several squishy mattresses and one murder scene contingent on barfing later his star Isabelle Adjani takes to the hallway of a West Berlin subway station and acts so much that her insides literally come spilling out of her ears.
Possession is, it must be said, a lot...
Zulawski, in the understatement of the century, asks a lot from Adjani and Sam Neill as his central couple splitting apart, intestinal seam by intestinal seam -- Adjani herself has admitted to an emotional state in the aftermath of Possession's shoot akin to PTSD. She and Neill pummel each other and every person they come into contact with -- oh poor Margit Carstensen! -- with fists and guns and belly-hard roars. No wall or wrist was safe in its making; twas all grist for the eating, licking, humping, masticating.
The film's soul-deep hysteria often plays as farce, for me -- you can't even see the top it goes so far over into outer space at times, Zulawski's camera spinning around Adjani spinning. And yet for all its absurdist and structural black humor -- I've come to think of it as Dada Noir -- there's rapturous truth in it too, for anyone who's ever felt the helplessness of a love lost, running through their fingers like hot lava. I mean who hasn't imagined "The Other Man" as a tentacled squid monster writhing in a sex dungeon on the other side of town, where our beloved secrets away to do the unspeakable acts of sexual and moral depravity which we simply cannot offer? That's what they want? Fine, we'll give them madness and destruction, and we'll tear the whole world down with us!
And yet among Possession's madness there are calf-deep wells of genuine pathos we're suddenly plumbing through -- don't forget that infamous scene in the subway station comes at us as Adjani recounts the story of a past miscarriage. That's the moment she slips, and everything awful comes tumbling after -- all these pitch-black liquids pouring out of everybody are grief given weight, form, matter; this film's a two-hour spiritualist seance experience wherein Zulawski vomits up the gooey strands of his heartbreak, slippery and funktastic. Everybody keeps speaking of God and his presence -- here is nothing more divine than Creation and its sticky antithesis.
And Adjani, who won multiple acting prizes for this movie which nobody knew then what to do with -- its release got butchered, edited down and hidden away on Video Nasty shelves for eons -- proves herself more than up to Zulawski's mad task. While the showier subway scene's clearly the one for her career achievement reel my favorite passage of the movie comes at its midpoint, as Neill's character finds and watches some film-reels of his wife doing her day-job as a dance instructor to little girls.
In the footage Adjani interacts directly with the camera and with whomever it is that is filming her performance, becoming a more cruel taskmaster as the camera bears down on her, unblinking back. Her relationship with the invisible auteur of her insanity becomes mountingly explicit -- she and the camera taunt one another, pushing her behavior further to extremes. And suddenly we find ourselves watching the playfulness and complicity between filmmaker and actress, a muse participating in her own authorship, obliterating the lines between who's asking exactly what from whom. Isabelle Adjani, trust, is enjoying this self-exorcism.
Reader Comments (16)
Now that is a BRILLIANT performance.
I'm an outlier on this one - always glad when oddball cinema finds an audience, but watching "Possession" was one of my worst theater going experiences. It's just Adjani screaming at the top of her lungs for 2 hours straight. On a physical, auditory level - it's intolerable.
I agree Dave. I much prefer her in the Sharon Stone DIABOLIQUE remake.
This is one of the performances I was hoping to see highlighted in this series. Adjani is so deeply, palpably entrenched in her character's anguish in a way that feels real and over-the-top at the same time - she's really a marvel to watch. I think of this film as the crowning jewel of a group of films that includes things like Don't Look Now, The Brood, Antichrist, and most recently Midsommar among others. I don't know what you'd call the sub-genre, but I'm a sucker for that combination of domestic/relationship drama and horror.
Isabelle Adjani is always superb, she's in the same level of Marion Cottilard or Juliette Binoche of perfection;
and Peggy Sue: I DO love the 1996 remake of Diabolique, it's delicious but it is Sharon Stone acting circles around Isabelle. Thanks for reminding me of it.
I've always wanted to see this damn movie and can never find it! I will retry, it's so something I need to see.
My God... that was as terrifying performance and it was traumatic. Goddamn... that was a performance and she should've won every fucking award out there. The film itself... HOLY FUCK!
I hate being negative, but this must be one of the most pretentious articles I have read in years.
“Ectoplasmic” - sounds like an excellent word to use for every reader to understand. “Labor pains writ like arterial sprays “ - oh so literary. This writer must be a genius. “Intestinal seam by intestinal seam” - yep. We say this at least thrice a year. “Calf-depth wells of geniune pathos” - color me impressed.
I can go on and on, but I’m sorry it’s just too much. I came here to read and not to solve the mystery behind the Bermuda Triangle.
Fake Peggy is back.
I saw this one and Nosferatu during quarantine. Odd choices, I know! I get why people love it but it's my thing at all.
And she makes out with that octopus thing
The director has encouraged the whole "it's an allegory about the end of my marriage" thing, just as Cronenberg did with THE BROOD, but there's also a deeper religious/political allegory here that's all but ignored by critics. I really don't feel I know enough about Zulawski's world (Catholicism and what Milan Kundera called "the Tragedy of Central Europe") to completely understand it. I hope one day someone writes about this.
Rob - I can't either! I have a list of movies I want to see but can't locate, and this is by far the most high-profile title. Does anyone know why this is so inaccessible?
Amazing performance! Her screen presence is almost reptilian.
I agree with you all that it's outrageous how hard it is to see this movie -- I own the blu-ray, which was and is still outrageously overpriced. It's insane that Criterion or Amazon or SOMEONE hasn't put it onto streaming.
Pure poetry. Every review so beautifully written. Best reviewer since the great Pauline Kael.
Am I crazy or are the top 2 stills from The Ruins?