Possession (Zulawski, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm
This film is screening as part of the Discomfort Movies season.
Chicago Reader review:
Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 masterpiece opens with the messy separation of a
middle-class couple (Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani), then goes on to
imagine various catastrophic breakdowns—of interpersonal relationships,
social order, and ultimately narrative logic itself. The film can be
hilarious one moment and terrifying the next, and Zulawski's roving
camera only heightens the sense of unpredictability. Few movies convey
so viscerally what it's like to go mad: when this takes an unexpected
turn into supernatural horror, the development feels inevitable, as
though the characters had been bracing themselves for it all along.
Adjani won the best actress prize at Cannes for her dual performance (as
an unfaithful wife and her angelic doppelganger), but the whole cast is
astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals
that of the filmmaking. Performed in English and shot in Berlin by an
international crew, this also conveys a sense of displacement that's
always been crucial to Zulawski's work.
Ben Sachs
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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