by ·Comments Off on Possession (1981, Andrzej Zulawski)

Funny that I’d watch this a couple days after The Tenant, not knowing of their connections. Both are made by Polish directors who started by working under Andrzej Wajda, both star Isabelle Adjani, involve protagonists living in apartments away from their native countries, and don’t seem like horror movies at all until they go nuts in the second half.

Sam Neill (same year he played Damien in Omen 3) returns to wife Adjani (a couple years after Herzog’s Nosferatu) in divided Berlin after a long time away on a spy job (he gets paid in wads of cash). It’s a rocky homecoming, and there’s much yelling around their son Bob, but each claims to have been faithful – until Adjani’s friend Marjie (Fassbinder star Margit Carstensen) delights in telling Neill that Adjani has another man, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent of The Last Metro and The Serpent’s Egg), an annoying new-age super-self-confident dude whose mother (Johanna Hofer of Above Suspicion and A Farewell to Arms) supports the affair (Heinrich also has a wife and kid we never see). Screaming fights ensue (“If I’d known [Heinrich] existed in this world I’d have never had Bob with you”), Adjani acts more erratic and Neill acts more obsessed (he reverse-lookups Heinrich’s address in the white pages), and I’m worried that this won’t be a horror movie at all, but a relationship drama that says women are shrews who tear apart marriages with their selfish desires (Zulawski was inspired by his own bitter divorce).

Not a good sign for your relationship when you sit at different tables:

Heinrich vs. Neill:

But then! Neill hires a private eye (who is terribly obvious when tailing people) to follow his wife and it turns out she’s staying in a third apartment, a place Heinrich doesn’t know about, and he spins bouncing off the walls when he finds out. Investigating further (by walking right in), the detective is killed by a psychic demon, followed a few scenes later by his partner (huh, a sympathetic gay character in 1981). Yes, Adjani is cheating on both men with a Scanner tentacle-demon, and there’s a pod-person connection when Neill meets his son’s schoolteacher who is the spitting image of his wife but with green glowing eyes.

Adjani takes care of the detective’s partner:

Trouble in the subway:

Neill becomes crazily thrilled by all this, gives Heinrich the demon-apartment address then kills Heinrich himself in a bathroom when the demon doesn’t finish him off. He later blows up the apartment, stabs Marjie for good measure, provokes the cops (I don’t understand how he thought ramming their cars with a taxi would end well) and plots to escape with Adjani, but she has plans of her own, finally (amidst a police shootout) revealing her new glowing-green-eyed Sam Neill pod person (“I wanted to show it to you. It is finished now”), who escapes the shootout.

Bloody Sam Neill driving a motorcycle through Berlin screaming:

Banned in the UK, though Adjani won best actress in France (over Huppert, Ardant and Deneuve) and it was nominated at Cannes the year Wajda’s Man of Iron won. I liked this an awful lot, and am looking for more Zulawski movies (Third Part of the Night, The Devil and On The Silver Globe sound good).

by ·Comments Off on Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)

Brilliant movie. It’s a simple, straightforward story with just a few characters, but manages to have some of the most indelible horror scenes, the most erotic moments, best cinematography and craziest music I’ve seen/heard all year. The music has a real sense of humor, with punctuating sound effects, all drum-drumma-drum-drumma slash-YEAAAGH! drum-drumma-drum-drumma slash-YEAAAGH! a hundred times in a row. Later it uses a crackling sound, like someone walking on sticks.

The main characters are credited by their relationship to a missing man – Kichi’s Mother (Nobuko Otowa, also of Shindo’s Naked Island) and Kichi’s Wife (Jitsuko Yoshimura of Pigs and Battleships). Kichi never appears, and we assume he’s dead because his friend and neighbor Hachi (Kei Sato, the warden in Death By Hanging, a reporter in Pitfall) returns from war (escaped, not dismissed) and tells them so. Hachi’s kind of a bastard, so mom is suspicious that he’s lying, but mostly she’s afraid that Kichi’s horny widow will abandon her for Hachi. Before he showed up, the two women had a good racket going, killing unsuspecting escaped warriors who are either hiding or lost in the tall grasses and selling their armor and weapons to local merchant Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama, who possibly got naked in In the Realm of the Senses, was also in Vengeance Is Mine).

The two killers:

Ushi:

The young widow begins waiting for mom to fall asleep then sneaking away, racing through the grasses to Hachi’s hut. When I mentioned erotic scenes above, I meant the running itself, not their embrace after she arrives. The camera flies with her through the grass as she flails ahead at full tilt, mouth open, ecstatic with anticipation.

Hachi:

One night a demon-masked man appears at the hut when mom is alone and orders her to show him the way out of the grasses. He claims the mask protects his extremely handsome face and intimidates the enemy, and refuses to remove it when she asks. She leads him straight into the deep hole where they dispose of the soldiers they kill, then she drops down on a rope the next day and removes his mask, using it at night to scare her daughter-in-law into returning home, after a setup lecture about sin and punishment. But after one rainy night, the mask gets stuck, and after much pulling and prying, finally comes tearing off, disfiguring the mother’s face in the process. Incidentally, Hachi is killed the same night, but neither of the women find this out before the movie ends. The daughter flees, “a real demon!” and the mother follows, falling headlong into the hole shouting “I’m a human being!”

Criterion:

Released in Japan in 1964, the same year as Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes (a film to which it bears a number of striking resemblances), Onibaba is based on a Buddhist parable meant to encourage women’s attendance at religious convocations. But in Shindo’s hands the parable is gleefully deformed into a cautionary tale about sexual jealousy and unrequited passion, reaffirming his propensity for superimposing the modern and the ancient, not to mention God and the devil. Not only was Onibaba the director’s first period film, set in the sixteenth century during a time of constant war and ceaseless famine, it was also his first (of several to come) to place an overt focus — in shot after shot of the topless torsos of its central characters — on the ways that sexual desire, while essential to human survival, can also have cataclysmic consequences.