Rating of
4/4
Grips like no other
Bribaba - wrote on 05/03/11
“It’s about a woman who f**ks an octopus” was Andrzej Zulawski initial pitch to Paramount who, unsurprisingly, passed. Although partly true his reductive synopsis really doesn’t do the film justice, but then how to describe such a work? Various marketing departments tried the horror angle but that didn’t sell, either. Britain did its bit by adding the title to the list of ‘video nasties’ and banned the film outright. It disappeared for decades save from some dreadful VHS versions but now, it’s back.
The first thirty minutes of the film are raw and disturbing, like nothing I’ve ever seen. More a battle of the senses than sexes. It induces a kind of total recoil, even though the subject matter - a marriage in its death throes - is commonplace enough. The couple, already flirting with madness, then proceed to enter a surreal space closely related to purgatory. Looming in the background is the Berlin Wall, silently adding to the evil, and then there’s that thing in the corner, something undefined. Metaphors abound as Zaulawski references his troubled past in Poland - he wrote the script immediately after his film On the Silver Globe was destroyed (the costumes were buried!) by the Polish authorities, only weeks away from completion.
Isabelle Adjani, speaking English throughout, is amazing and her scene in the Berlin u-bahn is an extraordinary one amongst many. It’s a performances which garnered her a best actress award at the Cannes festival. Playing opposite Adjani is the normally mild mannered Sam Neill, here inhabiting a character a few miles along from the end of his tether. The wide-angle shooting and sound design add a freshness, making it hard to imagine that this will ever ‘date’.
