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.