Possession (1981)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Possession (1981) – A. Zulawski

Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill go insane as a couple experiencing a messy divorce.  And in fact, I’m not quite sure whether the real actors weren’t losing it too, given the obvious commitment to extreme experience that they demonstrate here.  There is a scene in the Berlin subway where Adjani seems to be having a seizure that is almost too much to bear. Both she and Neill spend much of the film covered in blood (the film was banned in several countries as a “video nasty”; although brutal, it isn’t sadistic torture porn or anything).  Basically, there appear to be two parallel narratives – the actual objective “facts” of the divorce and the subjective psychological experience of the couple that is somehow literally projected into reality as something horrible.  There is a monster that has taken possession of Adjani and she moves to a new apartment with it; some commentators think this monster represents her guilt for having an affair while Neill was away on business (he appears to be a Cold War spy).  Neill meets Adjani’s exact double (except with green eyes) who is apparently the school teacher for their young son, Bob.  He begins an affair with her – some think that she represents his ideal fantasized version of a wife/partner.  Eventually Adjani’s monster transmogrifies into another version of Neill.  It is all pretty WTF and intensely emotional – the plot is beside the point, just a series of encounters between Neill and Adjani and Heinrich (the man with whom she had the affair) as well as the detectives that Neill hires to follow her.  So, the objective narrative is pretty mundane but director Andrej Zulawski is more interested in the gut-wrenching subjective experience and unless you want to have one too, I’d be wary of this film.