Possession (Possession - France / Germany 1981) by Andrzej Zulawski
Possession (Trailer)
SHEET FILM In Berlin a dreamlike and unreal, Mark and Anna (played respectively by Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani) live with their son as soon as five years in a flat, practically adjacent to the famous wall.
The two are in full marital crisis. A crisis, after all, fairly conventional, with its usual lack of understanding, by mutual suspicion and dall'incomunicabilità which often is the backdrop to romantic relationships.
Mark, who works for the German secret services, he discovers his wife cheating on him with Heinrich, a strange man devoted to oriental practices, who lives with his elderly mother in an old building, relic German upper middle class.
Hoping to shed light in their marriage, the man decides to stop working. His superiors invite him, then, for a period for reflection but at the same time, gave him a new assignment, to say the least unusual find a strange man (possibly a former spy), to whom you do not know almost nothing, if not the inclination to wear pink socks.
Mark, obsessed by the behavior of Anna, increasingly bizarre and hysterical, entrusts the task of a private investigator to follow her. The detective discovers that she has rented, unbeknownst to her husband, an apartment in an old and decaying building. Here you will find the man at his own expense, a senseless and horrific truth. Anna, in fact, a second suitor: a Lovecraftian be obscene, with whom she performs regularly in tentacle sex.
In 1981, the Polish director Andrzej Zulawski ("The important thing is to love," "Love fool" and "shaman") Wayda former assistant, he made his most celebrated and controversial film.
Presented at the Cannes Film Festival, where an astonishing Adjani won the Palme d'Or for Best Actress, Zulawski's work was recognized immediately as the work extremely scandalous excessive, violent, unbecoming the viewer "traditionalist", but also redundant, annoying and free for the critics.
Film "cursed" by definition (the film was the subject of so many cuts and manipulations, that his actual life, even today, is a subject of debate), misunderstood by much of the criticism of the time (but now appreciated by a slice of the public not mainstream ), literally adored by a genius like David Lynch, "Possession" is without doubt one of the works more disturbing and provocative film history.
" Metaphysical Horror," "surreal journey dream-vision", "free and provocation Grand Guignol hysteria visionary" are just some of the labels and definitions that the film carries on his shoulders for nearly three decades. Apart from these obvious markings (which, however, have greatly contributed to the fame of the film), dried on filters, interpretations and viewpoints, what remains is the story of the failure of the traditional bourgeois couple's relationship. The representation of an unhealthy relationship degenerate and trivial, neutral and conventional at the same time. The depiction of a crisis that transports players to a painful state of normalcy, to one of unrelenting madness and abysmal. The story of a journey in a surreal scenario-metaphysical, to the madness, through obsession, the monstrosity (interior / exterior) and an unhealthy carnal and bloody frenzy, full of suggestions cronenberghiane.
ideal landscape for the way the two protagonists is a Berlin, before the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, uninhabited and unreal, that seems to escape from a painting De Chirico and Magritte. A desert town, metaphysical and surreal, and then impregnated with distorted and decadent atmosphere, where the only physical presence of man, in a disturbing sequence is documented with an old woman who rejoices in the distance after the explosion of a apartment. A room full of symbolism, sometimes all too obvious and smug, as in the case of the wall, symbol of the couple's inability to communicate, but also the division between good and evil, one of leitmotiv main film.
fundamental issue, which is inevitably that of doppelganger , the "double" in which we release into our obsessions and that becomes, in fact, our part monstrous, sick, and hidden . In the now famous scene underground (considered one of the most shocking sequences ever seen in a movie), Anna gives birth to two people (good and evil, black and white, male and female, east and west), one of which is identified with the most reassuring aspect of their personality, that is with Helen (also played by Adjani), the ideal Anna, tender and sweet kindergarten teacher and the other creature, part evil, protected and unspoken, is destined to become a kind of higher being, which will look like an idealized Mark. The good, seems to say Zulawski, is nothing but a pale reflection of the evil, at least until the apocalyptic final sequence, where, despite the triumph of the devil, good and evil are mixed up in a wonderful game of light and shade, on the face of ambiguous and beautiful Isabelle Adjani.
MEISTER Steiner says: 8
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