What I got, instead, was an intentionally tedious portrayal of the process of a young woman descending into madness when her older sister Helene goes on holiday. Repulsion, as anyone who has seen the film will know, refers to the protagonist’s intense repulsion when confronted with men – all of them. Polanski’s film is a slow and terrifically difficult thing to watch only because he does his job so well, as does Catherine Deneuve as Carole Ledoux, and the well-chosen pace of the film adds immeasurably to the effect. It seems as though the audience, too, may go insane during this ordeal; we are privy to Carole’s psychotic episodes in which she sees hands grasping at her from the walls, to her visions of a man forcing his way into her bed and raping her, and we can nearly feel her discomfort ourselves when men pursue her. Her journey into madness is mirrored by the decay of a rabbit’s carcass which rots untended in her apartment while Helene is away. <i>Repulsion</i> is not an easy film to watch, nor is it a chills-and-thrills horror flick.

However, I didn’t come here to talk about what a fantastically terrible portrayal of psychosis Polanski created. That, I will leave to decades of critics. It’s not exactly recent.

What I do find interesting, however, is that immediately after seeing the film a (female) friend and I spoke briefly about the sense of passive, unwanted objectification which seemed to be a large part of Carole’s discomfort with men. I then hopped onto the internet to read what others had written about the film, and I cannot say I was pleased with what I found.

It seems entirely possible that a large portion of the (male) critics who have written about the film saw different things from my friend and me. Many describe Carole Ledoux as “sexually repressed,” and one review from the UK’s Variety even describes her as “deeply attracted to the thought of men but also deeply loathing of the thought of them.” This seems perhaps trivial, as I myself described the film in such a way that may suggest sexual repression, but after viewing this vividly portrayed insanity it seems somehow lacking. To call Ledoux’s horrible fear and disgust of men “sexual repression” seems to equate it with the iconic fifties housewife, cleaning and cooking and never paying homage to her own wants and desires; this equation seems to somehow downplay the horror and the psychosis of the film itself.

What’s more, Variety‘s description of the protagonist as “deeply attracted” to men in any way is a curious one. Ledoux is at best, as my friend noted, sometimes seemingly indifferent to men. She refuses to speak. She doesn’t react to a thing they do. She mostly sits, silently, staring in another direction and following where they drag her in their avid pursuits. She is at worst terrified and reviled by them; a would-be boyfriend kisses her in the car outside her sister’s apartment, and she runs immediately to the bathroom to brush her teeth. When she is left alone, she sees hands grasping at her from the walls, and visions of a man (who, through continual camera focus on a family photograph, we can perhaps infer to be her father) raping her in her bed. Polanski’s camera is never pointed at men in a sexually positive manner, and neither do we see Carole Ledoux reacting to men in any way that belies attraction.

This is not a reading uncommon in other reviews of the film, either, and not the most disturbing by far. Time Out London‘s review remarks upon her “fantasies and nightmares,” to which I would query, “What fantasies?” I am concerned, then, with the reading of Ledoux’s rape visions as fantasies, something evident in many of the reviews (indeed, to read her as “deeply attracted to the thought of men,” implies this as well). In these visions, a man bursts into her room; we, the audience, see terror on her face and a looming black silhouette. The man then forces himself down upon her and begins brutally raping her, and she clutches at the sheets, her face twisted in agony, unable to get out from beneath him no matter how she struggles. Throughout, these rape scenes are utterly silent. No one will help her, this tells us, and there is no hope of escape. Perhaps someone read this as a fantasy because she says nothing – but the look on Deneuve’s face should tell the viewer quite enough.

However, even those reviews which have no distressing mention of Carole Ledoux harboring some affection or attraction to men fail to mention a theme of the film which seemed, to me, to be rather prominent. Some may discuss rape, terror, and psychosis, but not a single critic I could find mentioned the obvious hyperbole this film posed: that of passive, unwanted objectification. Ledoux’s revulsion to men was a clear parallel to the everyday manner in which women were (and sometimes still are) viewed by the larger culture – to the dynamic created by traditional gender roles which presses men into the role of the predator and women into the role of the preyed-upon, and the terror this can induce when the attention is unwanted.

While I am not of the feminist school stressing “taking back the night” and Dworkin’s assessment of male-female relations by any stretch (I find these small-minded, claustrophobic attempts at equality), I am disturbed at the number of men who saw in Deneuve’s performance any hint of heterosexual attraction. It is both confusing and terrifying to think that, in her disinterested or utterly horrified expressions and eventual violence toward men, someone could see hidden obsession or allurement. It is doubly frightening to imagine in Ledoux’s nightmarish rape visions a fantasy, and I wonder at the man who could find this reading apt.

Deneuve’s beauty is certainly undeniable, but these strange reviews seem still indicative of a lingering problem the movie itself critiques: we cannot yet, as a culture, divorce ourselves from the predator/prey mode of attraction, even in viewing a movie which poses this hyperbole distinctly. There is a certain filmic hypocrisy in seeing in Repulsion some kind of secret struggle between attraction and repulsion which, frankly, I could not detect, and to say the least this reading misses some of the film’s most pointed social criticism. This is not to say I object entirely to objectification – only that I object to the kind of damaging, unwanted, and one-sided objectification I believe Polanski to be critiquing in this film, and that I object even more strongly to those who would see, in Repulsion, any small secret approval of their own actions to these ends.

works cited:

“Repulsion Review,” 1 Jan 1965 Variety. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117794407.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0 07 June 2008.

“Repulsion Movie Reviews, Pictures,” Rotten Tomatoes. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/repulsion/?critic=creamcrop#mo 07 June 2008.

“Repulsion Review,” Time Out London. http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/76606/repulsion.html 07 June 2008.