“Possession”: I’ve waited a long time for this and it was worth it
A fever dream born of trauma, dissolution, anger, hatred, and resentment fused with an emotional pitch on the order of Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” and the dread of Cronenberg’s “The Brood” with a little of Lynch’s “Eraserhead” thrown in for good measure does nothing to prepare anyone for Andrzej Zulawski‘s 1981 film “Possession.” I’ve waited years for this and have watched Metrograph’s 4K restoration twice already.
I’m genuinely at a loss. It’s one of the most searingly brilliant films I’ve ever seen with Isabelle Adjani’s performance holding the center. If I’m hesitant to say it is her greatest performance, it’s only because her range is so vast and she is so versatile. And yet, perhaps it is her best, in the same way Deniro’s Jake Lamotta in “Raging Bull” is often referred to as his greatest turn (or should we go with Travis Bickle?) In any case, “great” might be a less reprehensible word than “best” but the point is that what Adjani gave here is supreme. The analogy to Bergman’s masterpiece is made complete in that Adjani’s acting is as raw and honest as Ullmann’s. It is also more feral, fearsome, and frankly, scary. For as much as I’ve seen similar turns by other great actors (Ullmann included), what she accomplished here is unique.
As Anna, the wife of spy Mark (Sam Neill, whose own performance is by turns chilling and the epitome of a man, a fool perhaps, tearing himself up out of arrogance, possessiveness, and jealousy), Adjani is done with her marriage, done with pretense, and has taken up with Heinrich, a peculiar fellow who may be a businessman, a poet, or any number of trades but expresses himself as earnestly as any New Age practitioner you can imagine. Does she love him? Apparently, yes. He is superior in every way to Mark. She says so. She tells Mark this.
Mark is stupefied and blindsided, but it becomes clear that this was a long time coming. If he didn’t see it coming, it’s because he was absent or simply unwilling to see. Nevertheless, Mark spirals into a heightened emotional register that sets Anna into an even more intense one. For good reason; there is much more going on with her than Mark or for that matter, anyone, might realize.
I should also mention that Mark and Anna’s apartment is across from a checkpoint on the Wall. The symbolism may be too arch for some, but given the stakes and the intensity of the drama, the Cold War divisions enhance the enormity of emotional turmoil. Additionally, Mark is a spy who may be getting out of the game for good. At his exit interview, his superiors remain impressed with his work and wonder if his leaving his position for family isn’t a matter of letting his feelings get in the way. Also, “Does our subject still wear pink socks?”
His cohorts will show up later in the film to coerce him back in, but Mark will have none of it. Indeed, one of them belittles Mark for his unwillingness to come back as well as his confusion.
For much of the first half of the movie, we are on relative terra firma with a charged and bordering on violent dissolution of a marriage. A young son, Bob, is at the center of the whirlwind and at first, Mark makes the decision to move out and surrender visitation rights to Bob because as Mark puts it, “He’s fucked up enough as it is without me playing Sunday Daddy.” There is merit in this; Mark moves out and after three weeks of a bender (we see the physical after-effects as Neill silently writhes and tosses around and falls out of bed to arise with having to struggle to regain the power of speech), returns to the apartment he shared with Anna to find Bob unkempt, jelly-smeared, among the wreckage of a home abandoned. Anna said she’d be back soon but hadn’t returned.
Upon cleaning Bob up, Anna returns as Mark is rocking back and forth and asserts his will; he tells her she needs order, and he’s there to restore it. He’ll stay and they’ll be a family, but she must call it off with Heinrich (even after Mark has said he’d do whatever she wanted to be happy) but she must call him now. Anna says she can only do it in person. Mark forbids it and delivers the ultimatum that if she walks out that door, it’s for good.
Later, Heinrich calls Mark. “Anna is with me and she will stay with me.” The eventual meeting with Heinrich doesn’t go well (Heinz Bennant, a Fassbinder vet…as well as Bergman, Schlondorff, and Maragethe von Trotta, among others..crazy good actor.)
Heinrich is the epitome of collected and articulate as Mark remains and grows increasingly agitated. “You can hate me as much as you like but it’s you who want to know things from me so please make it possible.” Mark assaults Heinrich and Heinrich takes Mark apart.
Heinrich does seem to be the polar opposite of Mark in terms of openness, honesty, and acceptance. We are still in relatively “normal” narrative structure. He also seems far more capable than a well-trained spy of dealing with a physical threat.
The next day, Mark takes Bob to school to discover that his teacher is Anna’s doppelgänger (also played by Adjani), so much so that he takes it that she is Anna for a moment.
Anna returns (the next day?) and the kitchen becomes a battleground for the first of two rows. The first confrontation in the kitchen is the pivotal moment when the film begins to ratchet up the tension and explosion; Anna is disgusted by Mark and lets him know it. Her hatred and anger at Mark dwarfs his remorse. Adjani’s expression after she slaps Mark is frightening. It is a moment of quiet and a smile, and madness. After Mark has slapped her around in response, even with blood dripping down her chin, it is she who has clarity.
Mark: “You know what this is for? All the lies!”
Anna: “Then you would have to add more.”
Anna seems possessed of some kind of power when, after Mark has pursued her into the street, she walks as if about to step in front of a truck carrying the husks of cars. It swerves out of the way and the cars go flying off the bed. Anna’s face is transcendent.
From here, after meeting Margie (the great Margot Carstensen…did Zulawski just poach Fassbinder’s acting company in full?) who is going to look after Bob, there is Bob’s hiring of the PI (Carl Duering, Dr. Brodsky in “A Clockwork Orange”…seriously, the casting in this film…). The PI is not fated long for this world.
Then the second kitchen sequence. Things ramp up again.
The meat grinding scene in the kitchen is grueling, intense at a completely different level. Do we really believe that Mark cares about Anna or is he just fearful of abandonment? Is he torn up because he can’t control her, can’t possess her? She answers his questions with silent nods and shakes of the head. When she takes the carving knife to her neck and shrieks and goes catatonic, we see a more palpable evidence of “possession” in the more supernatural sense as she calms down and seems unfazed overall by any pain. She also doesn’t bleed as profusely as she should. Later in the sequence when Mark deliberately cuts his forearm with the knife, she is calm, Mark is calm, and looking at his wounds, tells him “it doesn’t hurt.” “No.” Is Mark now “inflected” somewhat by what possesses Anna?
This works on a metaphorical as well as literal - as literal as horror films can be - level.
We pick up with Anna being tailed by the PI. Indifferent to all around her, she allows a drunk on the U-bahn to reach into her shopping bag and take a banana.
Duering’s PI is one of the worst tails ever seen on camera; his shadowing is as obvious as the sky. There is precious little levity in a film like this. It isn’t necessary, but it is welcome. We are now in Alfred Jarry territory. He informs Mark of Anna’s whereabouts and tells him he’ll see if she’s alone and in a further comic sequences, enters her apartment as a building inspector come to check the windows.
(Duering and Adjani are pretty fabulous in the sequence, particularly when he begins to stutter when she asks him if he’d like some wine…a shout out to “A Clockwork Orange” - though not a scene that Duering was in?)
Anna tries to get rid of him, and she goes from agitated and upset, to more resigned and then secure as the PI enters the room where the Creature is shrouded in the darkness. She brutally stabs him in the throat, murdering him.
Heinrich: There is nothing to fear except God, whatever that means to you.
Mark: For me, God is a disease.
Heinrich: That’s why through a disease we can reach God.
Bob’s teacher (she is called “Helen” in the IMDb page; not named in the movie) shows up to visit Mark and Anna about Bob while Bob is in the bath. Heinrich shows up, as well, in the throes of some kind of psychic turmoil. At this point, Mark is ascendant in power. Heinrich is barely holding it together and then Mark tells Heinrich that Anna has moved out (and lies about her living with a guy.)
Helen is putting Bob to bed with a story. In a touching moment, Bob asks Mark if he likes Bob’s teacher (he doesn’t know her that well yet), Mark confesses he finds Anna prettier than the teacher. Later she tells Mark that Bob has waking screaming from naptime at school.
Mark tells Helen that he is at war with women. The are unstable, nothing to trust.
Taking up the carving knife, she says, “I come from a place where evil seems easier to pinpoint because you can see it in their flesh.” She tells Bob that he is contaminated because he never feels free. When Mark tries to kiss her, she shakes her head, but says “all right, together we can listen if Bob cries.” They lie together and she tells Mark he doesn’t have to make love to her and he says he won’t even try. They laugh and soon Bob is crying out - something he doesn’t do at home.
After leaving Bob at school and silently leaving Bob with Helen, he encounters the head of the detective agency saying that the PI hadn’t returned or checked in. Bob confesses that he’s losing his ambition. The detective agency head tells Mark that he and the PI live together.
The agency head goes to Anna’s and meets a fate similar to his lover’s.
We see Mark stopping at his apartment door with a package from Heinrich in front of it. It’s a film of Anna teaching ballet and torturing a student (although I’ve seen enough classes where this might be considered normal). She ruminates on the twin sisters with her, “faith” and “chance”; both are aspects, perhaps, limits of embodied existence. Is there a third way out, like cancer or madness? “Cancer or madness contort reality, the possibility I’m talking about pierces reality.”
Anna talks to the camera and confesses that she is the maker of her own evil. “Goodness is only some kind of reflection on evil.”
Mark (to Anna): You know, when I’m away from you, I think of you as a monster or a woman possessed. And then I see you again and all that disappears.”
There is a cut to Anna in their apartment among complete disarray. She tells Mark she has to go to the laundry, stuffing clothes into the refrigerator. Mark tells her that he sees how hard it is for her that she must be feeling turn apart. She wants to be home, but when she is, she wants to be away (at her apartment with the Creature) and when there, she wants to be home. At that point, Adjani’s Anna seems to be having a Lady Macbeth moment of trying to rub something off her hand.
On the couch, Mark remains calm as Anna grows increasingly feral. She calls up the image of the two sisters again, locked in mutual death grips to see who will die first. We then cut to Anna looking up at Christ on the cross, seemingly either in ecstasy or pain. The sounds she utters are as animalistic as those earlier on the sofa. Then comes the mythic subway tunnel sequence that may be one of the most disturbing ever captured on screen. It’s too unnerving to discuss. What leads up to the actual miscarriage she experiences is far more disturbing than any graphic display of bodily fluids. Adjani conveys madness, deterioration, and loss through one of most arduous physical displays I’ve ever seen.
“What I miscarried there was Sister Faith and what was left was Sister Chance. So I had to take care of my faith to protect it.” “That’s what you’re doing there? (At her apartment with the creature.) “Yes.” “You like death…You’ve hardened. For the first time, you look vulgar to me.”
Mark tells Anna about being a child and watching a dying dog come to die under the house. It let out a little yelp as if it had seen something real.
Later, on the phone, Mark talks to Heinrich’s mother (sardonically and snidely) and gives her Anna’s address.
Dropping Bob off at school, Helen gives Mark a slip of paper (why does he stop and then return to her?) “What is it?” “My name.”
Anna: We are all the same. Different words, different bodies, different versions. Like insects!”
Heinrich goes to Anna’s apartment to make love to her, and bring her back He brings a packet (of opium?). With this, “love opens to absolutely unknown horizons”. More poetic palaver falls from Heinrich’s lips and ere long, Heinrich sees the creature in the room. It unhinges him, and in short order, he sees the chopped up corpse of the head of the detective agency; Anna begins to stab at him, telling him that he’s no different from anyone else, we are all the same, just different versions, like insects. And with one deeper - though not fatal - thrust: “Meat!”
Heinrich flees and Anna returns to a bedroom where the creature is laid out in the darkness. She begins to disrobe. Cut to Mark and Bob playing and Heinrich calling Mark to come to him. “Stay where you are…there’s a bar at the corner. Bleed for a while until I get there.” Margie shows up and Bob asks her to look after Bob. “It’s mommy! Calling me!” Margie faints, cut to Mark in Anna’s apartment, which is empty. Mark closes the window, and after turning on the gas in the kitchen, closes it.
Then he heads to the bar where he murders Heinrich in a bathroom stall, braining him unconscious with the casing of a unit over the toilet and then stuffing Mark’s head in the toilet as he flushes the toilet, finishing the job by drowning him. Mark returns to Anna’s flat, uses a heating coil to ignite matches after opening the kitchen door, blowing up the apartment.
Upon returning to his apartment, he encounters Margie with her neck slashed, dying. Anna is standing in their bedroom. Both are traumatized. Anna asks Mark, “do you believe in God?” She smiles: “It’s in me.” She kneels before him and says, “take me.” Her eyes go staring off into space as Mark kisses her. After coitus, they lie together. Anna killed Margie because she saw the Creature and tried to take it from her. “It has to be protected”, Mark observes. “Yes”, replies Anna. Mark concludes: “Like a child.”
As they rise, Mark frames an escape for both of them. He has to close the door because “It” is with her now. Mark stuffs Margie’s body in a garment bag, and into the trunk of his car, calls Heinrich’s mother to tell her that he’s going to find out what happened to Heinrich’s soul, and then come to her and tell her.
He stops at Helen’s to drop Bob off with her. After an enigmatic exchange, he leaves for Margie’s.
Helen: Will you promise me something.
Mark: Yes.
Helen: Whatever it is.
Mark: I promise.
Once at Margie’s, he ascends the stair to see one of the most unnerving visuals in cinema; Anna writhing in sexual ecstasy being ravaged by the creature in a motif out of Hokusai. The creature’s tentacles are all over and in her, though it’s head is shrouded in shadows. Anna’s looks Mark in the eye, and repeats, “almost…almost…almost…”
Heinrich’s mother: I”ve always wondered what is worse: to take another man’s wife, to hurt a child, or to kill.
Mark visits Heinrich’s mother who discusses what a beautiful man her son was, recognizes that he is gone, and commits suicide.
At a bridge by the wall, his old boss comes up and tries to recruit him to help save a drowning a world. He leaves them heads back to Margie’s on Heinrich’s motorcycle, using a gun he stole from Heinrich hi-jacks a cab to run into the cop’s car to create a diversion, drawing them away from Anna. He kills a cop, gets on the bike, and as he takes off, the cop cars spontaneously explode, and Mark speeds screaming until he crashes by the river. He enters a building with a seemingly endless spiral staircase, dying all the way up. Below he sees Anna coming after him. He tries to wave her away, but she still come up to him. She smiles as she comes up the stairwell, followed by a version of him. “I wanted to show you; he’s finished now.” Dying Mark raises his gun to shoot his Other (improved) version and is gunned down, along with Anna by the men from his spy agency. He dies kissing her; she takes the gun from his hand, arches her back and shoots herself. New Version Mark, looks at Mark and says it’s so hard to live with it, eh, brother?”
New Version Mark takes the gun, encounters a woman at the top of the stairs, gives her the gun and jumps to his death. We see Mark’s (former) boss putting his shoe on, over a pink sock.
Cut to Bob playing with army men at a table with a bowl of soup in a sterile apartment. The doorbell rings and Helen asks him to answer it. He refuses. “Why not, Bob? It could be your father.” Bob grows more agitated as she says she’ll answer the door and he begins repeating “don’t open! Don’t open!” As the tracking shot pans to follow her going to the door, we see Mark’s (or his twin’s or another version’s) form through the glass. Bob continues repeating his request that she not open the door and climbs into the bathtub already filled with water. He lies in it face down. We don’t know if he’s drowning himself or merely holding his breath as earlier in the film, he impressed his father with his breath-holding skill.
We hear air-raid sirens and bombs exploding as Bob’s teacher turns away from the door and stares into the camera with a haunting or hunted yet opaque or unreadable expressions.
This is the first film to come along since “Blue Velvet” where I felt compelled to watch it more than once or twice. Like Lynch’s work, there is on the surface, a (relatively) straightforward story. Like Lynch’s work, it’s heavily stylized in both performance and visual presentation. And like Lynch’s work, it is fully rife with layer upon layer of emotive/emotional content, something on the order of invocative associations, and perhaps more overtly aware of fusing the intrapersonal with the political.
It’s in the latter where Zulawski doesn’t lose focus so much as rather hits the nail square on the head for what seems either heavy handed metaphor or, as I think more likely, no other way to end the freaking movie.
That the film is set in a divided Berlin resonates throughout the film; it’s not as foregrounded as it might have been with other auteurs, but Zulawski capitalized on the historical moment to construct a simulacrum of his own dissolving marriage.
There is much that I question about his relationship to his own characters and how they go at each other and ultimately, Zulawski’s attitude to Anna and by extension, Helen. Were it not for Sam Neill’s performance, Mark could have come off much less sympathetic (and there were moments when I’ve felt a near visceral need to slap him myself) than he does.
If Mark is Andrej’s stand-in, then I wonder how self-aware Zulawski was in his writing. Mark is, of course, resentful, jealous, and stubborn; but his repeated attempts to keep Anna feel genuinely uncertain, shaky, and at times, even insincere. His pleas to her range from dictatorial to petulant to pathetic and Anna’s having none of it. There’s an honesty in the writing that saves the film from being merely misogynist.
There is, make no mistake, misogyny, but either unconsciously or by design, it feels thwarted by how transparently foolish and ineffectual Mark is and how frighteningly powerful Anna is. If she’s a character written by a man who is rendering a woman into a demon, he seems to recognize that she has her own agency and will to be who she is, without a man. Indeed, her spurning of Heinrich was a telling character turn.
Zulawski wasn’t a fool and Anna doesn’t come across as merely insane or angry or possessed of any single or sole emotional tone. This is there in the writing and it’s only expressed more fully with Adjani’s work. This does lead to something both Adjani and Neill have expressed since the film’s release; both were traumatized by the experience. Neill said he and Isabelle were asked to do things no one should ever be asked to do and both he and Adjani have said that even so, these are the kind of roles that you can only do when you’re younger. Adjani paid for her performance more dearly, though.
The idea that a director would put his actors through such ordeals smacks of abuse and outright manipulation, particularly where women are concerned. Adjani pointed out that she knew of no woman who worked with him more than once (Malgorzata Braunek - his first wife - starred in his first two films; his lover of many years Sophie Marceau worked on three films with him.) In any case, without knowing Zulawski, I don’t want to level a blanket statement against him; but it’s not too difficult to see that he was consumed with anger and frustration at the time.
All of this makes the doppelgängers and the twinning of Mark with the Creature and Anna with Helen more transparent as wish fulfillment scenarios. Anna would no doubt like to have had a Mark that would conform to her desires and Mark desired a woman who woman who would look after their son, and take care of his needs. When Mark disparages women to Helen, as if they are all the same, she says the only thing women have in common is menstruation. Nevertheless, Mark continues to act as if he didn’t get what Helen said.
When Anna and Mark do decide to flee together, Zulawski introduces a tentative alliance. Anna’s repeated moans of “almost…almost…” while in the throes of ecstasy with the tentacled creature are less about climax in the literal sense, than in the figurative; from this union arises a new Mark, one that is intended to replace the old one.
If Mark 2.0 didn’t die from his storeys-deep leap and that is his shadow we see in the final scene of the film, we can assume he is the shadow that hangs over the green-eyed Helen and even Bob. As the bombs begin to fall, Zulawski pushes the point of the painful breaking up of a relationship to breaking. As I said, it’s a little too on point; but perhaps, only in some ways.
In others, the narrative can be expanded like a Platonic ideal to serve as a general metaphor for all painful schisms. This kind of reading denudes the work of its immediacy and visceral impact. The flip side is that ending one of the most emotionally fraught films ever with an apocalyptic armageddon outside the frame makes sense. At some point, end of the world or not, Helen will have to go check on Bob. Bob will have to quit hiding in the tub (unless he drowned himself), and who knows? Maybe Mark’s double just returns to the shadows. However, the world they knew is done.
With Cronenberg’s “The Brood”, another film born of another auteur going through an ugly divorce, we remain centered on the man’s experience. We don’t see much of Samantha Eggar, really, and when we do, she’s not pleasant. However, like Anna, Eggar’s character is a force of nature and giving birth to a different type of chaos. We see more of Anna’s side throughout “Possession”, but I keep wondering, what types of films would Zulawski and Cronenberg’s ex-wives made?
In referring to “Scenes from a Marriage”, it’s not lost on me that neither Zulawski nor Cronenberg were able to quite convey 360 degree, inclusive and nuanced narratives (though I suppose Zulawski comes closer). If Ullmann and Josephson’s characters in Bergman’s opus are more fully realized than Zulawski’s, it’s a measure of Bergman’s strengths as a master. There is no room for such gradations in a film like “Possession.” I would still put Adjani’s performance on par with Ullmann’s, though. It makes for a compelling study in similarities and contrasts.
Given the nature of the films and taking into consideration how very different they are, it would be idiotic not to recognize the shades and colors that Ullmann brings to Marianne; however, Adjani gets her chance in the quieter moments to add subtlety and considerable depth to Anna and by way of Helen (if we choose to see Helen as an extension or Janus face to Anna).
The shared ground in both Ullmann’s and Adjani’s performances in their respective films is the ferocity of their anger and resentment at their spouses. (Josephson’s got an altogether meatier role than Neill; it would be unfair to compare them.) But Adjani is given freedom to go places I don’t think even Ullmann has gone (and I’ve got “Persona” in my mind as I write that). There is a feral, untethered force in Anna that finds its apex in the subway miscarriage scene, but that we see come to the fore throughout. Even when it’s expected, it’s destabilizing, fearful, and frankly, awe-inspiring.
It’s difficult to attempt to sum up a film like this with any degree of pith. It’s all in the execution and the experience. Given too much thought or analysis, it tends to not hold together because it’s not a film that about anything but dissolution, loss of an other and loss of oneself. There’s plenty of meat on the bone until it too, starts to dissolve.
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Gallery
Of course, no still photograph can capture onscreen performance, but some of these photos may approximate what lies in wait for the uninitiated and hints at something of the nature of the film. Bruno Nuytten’s cinematography is delicious throughout with a a preponderance of blue tones contrasted now and again by changes in palette when there are shifts in interior shots.
Click or select and image to launch a slideshow or a larger image.
I’ll start with these portraits of Adjani’s Anna. This hardly conveys what she’s doing in these scenes, but perhaps this does get across the range of the emotional spectrum she had to express.
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| “He’s very tired. He made love to me all night.” |
And last, Adjani as Helen. As Anna’s twin, she is - or rather seems - more pliable or malleable. Or perhaps, she is merely more grounded and stronger than Mark seems to realize.
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