The beauty of the cinema universe is that it is big enough to allow exploration and even discoveries. I confess that I knew nothing about the Polish director Andrzej Zulawski. His 1981 film ‘Possession‘ was waiting for me for a while to watch, and the surprise was huge. Here is a strong and original film-maker from the country of Wajda and Polanski, a little younger than them, whose work I completely ignored. ‘Possession’ is a daring, violent, challenging work, which shocked the audiences at its release. It was mis-categorized because it refuses standing in a defined shelve as Zulawski juggles with the genres. It anticipates trends that would be visible but not completed accepted even decades later. It includes many hidden corners and secret ciphers that can be decrypted only by references to the personal biography of the director. It is no easy watching, not only because of the large amount of shocking visuals but also because Zulawski does not like and does not care to explain everything that he shows on the screen. He relies on us, the viewers, to be smart enough and to fill in the missing with our own pieces of imagination. Or of horror.
‘Possession’ begins as a film about a falling apart marriage. We are still less than a decade since ‘Scenes from a Marriage‘ and ‘Kramer vs. Kramer‘ were made. But we immediately realize that the separation between the businessman (or maybe the spy) Mark (Sam Neill) and his beautiful wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) will not be an easy separation, that behind the seemingly trivial reasons (the suspicion of infidelity of the wife) there is something much more evil about Anna’s personality and the forces that have taken over her. The story quickly slips into violence but especially into the supernatural, and I will say no more here than that Zulawski used in this film the services of Carlo Rambaldi, the creator of aliens and monsters who contributed to the ‘look’ of some movies like ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial‘, ‘Alien‘, ‘Dune‘ and ‘King Kong Lives‘. Isabelle Adjani creates one of the most intense roles of her career in this film. I hope that the information about her suicide attempt at the end of the filming was just a rumor, but I’m not surprised. I confess that Sam Neill was not on my list of favorites so far, but his creation in this film has greatly increased his rating. I need to mention also the German actor Heinz Bennent, who had already starred in films by Bergman and Truffaut, in an ambiguous and memorable role of the lover who completes the triangle.
I think that ‘Possession’ is a film that cannot be fully understood without references to the personal biography of its director. Zulawski himself had gone through a traumatic divorce, and seems to be exorcising his feelings through shocking scenes and images belonging to the extremes of the horror film repertoire. However, the Devil is also present under another incarnation in the film. It took me a while to realize that the action was taking place in the divided Berlin during the Cold War. The presence of evil is explicit in the horror scenes and implicit in the location, the apartment where most of the horrors take place being placed right next to the Wall, overlooking the communist world that Zulawski had to leave to create in freedom. The production is international, the film takes place and is filmed in Berlin by a Polish director, the main heroes are actors from France and Australia, and the biggest admirer is the Italian Dario Argento, who I think would have signed the film without hesitation. ‘Possession’ is a film that gains in historical perspective. Today’s viewer can see in it a forerunner (but not a much more delicate one) of extreme productions like Lars von Trier‘s ‘Antichrist‘. For those who are not afraid of violence on screen, it is also an original combination between art cinema and the horror genre.