The Ecstasy Of Break-Up Psychosis: Possession (1981)

We are all the same, but in different words,
In different bodies, and different versions.

These words above (especially the dub-science word, version and the ultimate word, words) called out to me from the media feed of fellow sub sub Jason D. Bigelow, subtitling what seemed to be a still from one of the only 70s/80s Occult Horror Films Starring Moon Eyed Brunette I hadn't seen yet. The web search for the phrase brought only one return, an ancient message board movie-quote stump game for which this phrase proved successful in obscuring its source, the Andrzej Zulawski film, Possession 1981.

The mystery lines, intoned (really, really) emphatically by Isabelle Adjani in the film, suggests other word versions, world visions, the kind of post-moral Unified Field Theory that so terrified Harry Smith and Albert Einstein, they would build planetary weapon systems just to combat its implications -- such is the sex-mind bomb of Possession 1981. Banned outright in the UK, US distributors would censor everything butthe violence. And of course, after viewing, I notice it happens to be playing at Film Forum this week, where coincidentally, I first caught Celebration At Big Sur, our (very, very) necessary on-the-'Tube comedown after the Method-acting-is-death-sport (with tentacles) of Possession 1981. 

Like John Cassavetes directing a David Cronenberg version of Eyes Wide Shut, the competitive intensity of the acting in Possession 1981 anticipates and trumps recent efforts by would-be masters of extremity, Gaspar Noe and Lars Von Trier, by relentlessly pursuing the real terror of psychosis: not that anything is possible, but that everything is possible. The apocalypse never ends for a couple breaking up because both parties are as bat-shit insane as can be, and as Adjani shows in her blow-up-the-world performance, a serious challenge to all pretenders to the throne of no-wave banshee shriek: she knows you can always go more crazy.  

Comments

[Doug C.]

I can't even begin to say how much I like this film. At moments tender, perverse, and comic it possesses a quality that no other horror film shares. Truly ambivalent, the director almost seems like a passive observer of events than the controller of them. Shocking for the naked emotion portrayed and it's use of the most perverse of metaphors.

[A Bacus]

Blew my mind seeing Sam Neill in such a film. So raw and un-tethered; it's un-hinged, bizzaro, I am affected by it's content and will never be the same. Who in the HELL was the man in the pink socks?