POSSESSION 1981 ISABELLE ADJANI=SHEER PERFECTION.

YOU ARE NOT DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE. WE ARE ALL THE SAME BUT IN DIFFERENT WORDS, DIFFERENT BODIES, DIFFERENT VERSIONS. INSECTS. MEAT.

 JUST WATCH IT. POSSESSION 1981 is one of my top 10 personal favourites. A good film buddy of mine said that this would be right up my realm of understanding and boy was he right. We went into the Film Forum a few months ago when it was showing and from the opening creepy electronic piano beats and Isabelle Adjani's panicking eyes (my 2nd favourite brunette)I knew I was in for a ride. 

 

I do not know, nor wish to dissect what POSSESSION is about. I know what it meant for me to be stunned, at the edge of my seat in a dark room for 2 hours. When it was over I couldn't speak and wandered throughout the city my whole sensory body tingling. Like David Lynch says, why try to analyze an emotion? Especially when there are so many dark tremors and searing pains on the screen that the brave director ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI chose to expose in a beautifully raw, honest and terrifying journey.

A messy divorce? Berlin, West Germany/The Wall? Supernatural happenings? HATE, LOVE, BLOOD and HYSTERIA? SURE, it's all these things. And it's not for the faint of heart.Vincent Canby of the NY TIMES compared POSSESSION to REPULSION, one of my other all time favourites, but said the latter was a far better film.  Personally I feel that POSSESSION deals/plays with some of the themes of REPULSION but brings it to an entirely different level of pure shocking exposure that didn't exist on film really in 1965. I find POSSESSION strangely refreshing and new. REAL terror and fear and cruelty is depicted in POSSESSION unlike most modern horror films that are cheap pornography/butchery.

This being said, I do enjoy horror films but I hate gratuitous violence for no apparent reason. POSSESSION is extremely gory but it's balanced out with scenes/shots depicting wide desolation, sterility and coldness that was West Berlin, a perfect back-drop.

 

 Luckily, you can watch this film which is currently unavailable for us Americans without multi-regional DVD players. That's all I will say without giving away the experience..

                    http://youtu.be/R_XPJHwOsHE