Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (14 page)

The Berlin U-Bahn is a character in its own right, the scene of her neurotic commutes to the fatal flat on another end of Kreuzberg, again, by the Wall, with screaming dramatic graffiti: FREIE WEST and MAUER MUST GO (despite its location in the east of the city, Kreuzberg was on the West side of the Wall), and in its underpasses is the most terrifying scene of her possession, where she issues green-yellow gunk among terminal gargles. In all this there’s a place for comic relief: the whole character of lusty Margie, played by one of RW Fassbinder’s iconic actresses Margrit Carstensen and her comical enormous leg in plaster, with her failed courtship of Mark; in one of Żuławski’s turns of surreal genius, when a stupor-ridden Adjani is on the tube, she’s robbed of a bunch of bananas by a homeless man, who takes one and gently puts the rest back to her bag. Luxury goods were an issue in the East, mind you.

The demon can be many things: her anxieties, her neuroses that take the shape of an evil monster. The monster can be also simply a misogynistic punishment for the unfaithful Żuławski’s wife. A chronically decaying demon, built out of corpses, can also be the sum of the traumas his generation had to go through. It is common to say of JG Ballard that everything he ever wrote bore the shadow of the scenes he saw in a concentration camp in war-ridden Shanghai. Similarly, it is generally believed of Roman Polanski, that all his films, revolving around pain, trauma, sickly sexuality and claustrophobia, reveal the daily atrocities he saw as a child in the Krakow ghetto. There’s no doubt Żuławski also went through a traumatic childhood experience, motifs which he obsessively came back to throughout all his career: war, isolation, madness relishing in taboo eroticism, violence, evisceration, Polish
romanticisme fou
and our tragic history. Born in Lviv, Ukraine (then in Poland) in 1940, he barely survived the war, once nearly hit by a bomb, witnessing the destruction of the city and his family at a very early age. In
Possession
, as in all of Żuławski’s films, we observe from a claustrophobic space the decay of the family, of the city, and of the world.

2.5 Children of Ulrike Meinhof on the road to perdition.

2.6 Afterlife of Christiane F as a chanteuse. The cover of her 1982 maxisingle Final Church produced by members of Einsturzende Neubauten

Most of Żuławski’s and many of Polanski’s films, like
Repulsion, Cul de Sac
or
The Tenant
, all associate eroticism with perversion, anomaly, and fetishism in a genuinely surrealist way. Sex is creepy, sex involves an exchange of ugly secretions, preceding our inevitable decay; in fact, sex is a delight in revulsion, in turning to rot, to a corpse, an acceptance not only of dying, but also of dying disgustingly. Also, due to the amusing, pretty-ugly soundtrack of Andrzej Korzynski (re-released recently, characteristically by English aficionados Finders Keepers), the tale gains the feel of deceit and malice and of a childish game all at once: here music is at the same time parodic and deadly serious. Korzynski had a longstanding relation with two Polish directors: the great Andrzej Wajda and Żuławski, which can be compared to the greatest director-composer couples in cinema: Leone-Morricone, Argento-Goblin/Morricone,
Fellini and Rota. In
Third Part of the Night
it was more art and free rock and prog - a bricoleur, it’s clear he was taking from wherever he could. Some of his musique concrete experiments may owe a lot to the seminal activity of early electronic pioneers like the Polish Radio Experimental Studio and Wlodzimierz Kotoński. In
Possession
, he takes typically romantic styles like tango or waltz, and turns them upside down; similarly, he takes a children’s ditty motif, played on a broken harpsichord, and twists it with sardonic, scary undertones, like a parody of a cheap Hollywood film noir. Every romantic illusion, every fantasy of a nice, unproblematic life, must in the end collapse and rear its disgusting head to us. The motifs come back on a loop, signifying the hopeless routine, in which the life of Mark and Anna has hung, and how terrible the way out of it must be.

Anna’s ‘nymphomania’ can be also explained by her lack of orgasm. The whole film revolves around her lack of pleasure, or in general, woman’s incapability to get an orgasm from the men who surround her. Her craving for the beast is a typical Freudian case of women’s narcissism growing out of imprisonment and solitude (much like the aristocrat in Borowczyk’s
Beast
, who also craved a monster as a source of unbelievable ecstasy). ‘Almost’ we hear from Anna each time she has sex with her husband, with a tragic facial expression, typically, almost feeling sorry for him, not for herself. Woman blames herself for the lack of orgasm, never her lover. Neill is in his role often disarmingly, charmingly naive: he’s chasing his wife, this woman, whom he doesn’t understand a bit, always several steps behind her, disoriented. I’m sure this way Żuławski wanted to suggest who is in fact the vulnerable sex, cheated by the deceitful womanhood. As a proof of that, we have also Anna’s double, their son’s teacher, like in many other films (
Third Part of the Night
), replacing the (dead) Anna, who’s less demanding in bed.

Anna is disintegrating, gradually possessed by demons: with her body becoming like a lifeless marionette, sleepwalking through
the besieged city, with uncontrollable self-harm, shaken by one shock after another, obsessed with bodily mutilation (never before has an electric knife and kitchen automat meant so much in the marital drama). She’s breeding her monster on her neurosis, guilt and repulsion (like Catherine Deneuve keeping a dead rabbit in the fridge in Polanski’s
Repulsion
). I always actually thought the monster is primarily an idea, Anna’s punishment, her thoughts turned into flesh. A housewife and mother who has fallen from grace, living on sex like a vampire lives on blood, driven to madness by the increasingly mad Berlin, Anna falls out of her previous gender roles, challenges all the clichés of a woman of her class or position and mocks this spectacle. The only healthy products she keeps in her fridge now are the macabre heads and body-parts of her victims. It’s a story of a woman who stops controlling herself: stops controlling her libido (then of course she must fail as a mother), stops controlling her mind (madness ensues), then stops controlling her body – and then her fluids start to flow freely regardless of decorum: a dress is torn, a woman fucks an octopus, a woman expels vomit, yellow prenatal waters and finally the foetus, shaken, in a shocking scene, through all her orifices.

And then there’s the characteristic claustrophobia of all the interiors, as if the closeness of the eastern border and the restriction by the wall, especially felt in Kreuzberg district, caused a specific Island Fever mentality (
Insellkoller
). Polanski’s
Tenant
(together with
Last Tango in Paris
and
Possession
forming a great film trilogy about the madness induced by the claustrophobic bourgeois tenements), tells a story of a man slowly assuming the identity of the previous female tenant, who killed herself (it also casts Adjani against type as an unattractive, bespectacled woman who grows friendly with Polanski’s character). Similarly, Anna’s monster belongs to the insalubrious, skanky place of their love, feeding on the negative aura surrounding the place, just like on the blood and the headless bodies she brings him. Żuławski had a proper budget
behind him, so it is funny and telling that the beast was made by the special FX specialist Carlo Rambaldi, known mostly for his outstanding work on Ridley Scott’s
Alien
(as well as Argento’s
Profondo Rosso;
he also amazingly went on to model the little body of E.T.) and it would be tempting to compare
Alien
and
Possession’s
main females. The glass-blue eyes of Isabelle Adjani seem to tell the truth beyond recognition, beyond understanding…She knows that the only way through the Cold War of Europe and of her own marriage is to live it, become like them: crazy.

All this to the accompaniment of the melody of the sardonic music box, deriding the characters. The queasy, sickly and morbid ditty owes a lot to Polish Jazz and Komeda’s deliberately frantic notes, or the soundtracks to Lenica and Borowczyk’s animated films like
House
or
Labyrinth
, or Polanski’s
Cul de Sac
with its fucked up organ melody in a false key, just as the cheap soundtrack to horror movies. They all belong to something that could be called a Polish surrealist tradition, similar to the experimental Czech cinema. But its driven synths are another issue entirely, taking from the italo disco frenzy of the era, Giorgio Moroder’s Munich Machine.

The genius of
Possession
is that it’s at least three films at once. On the surface it is a horror movie, if slightly metaphysical, a giallo with images terrifying beyond comprehension, with a monster, cannibalism, blood, forbidden sexuality, macabre murders, corpses etc. On another level it is a marital break-up drama, much in the style of many Bergmans, like
Scenes from a Marriage
or
From the Life of the Marionettes
, with spouses self-harming, humiliating, and tearing each other apart. But that still wouldn’t explain why they act the way they act, at least if we won’t accept the rule of exploitation: there’s no rules, and a plot of no plot. Here, there definitely is a plot, and it develops with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Because another level of this drama is a political movie, set in the key city of international secret services and a scene of ideological war. Anna and Mark may live the relatively privileged
life of expats, in their nice low rise modernist flat, but are still subject to increasing alienation and isolation, harassed by men of mystery in ridiculous pink socks.

Trouble with sexuality pervades the whole film – woman’s sexuality, the murder of a homosexual couple, Anna’s previous lover ridiculed as an amateur of tantric sex and martial arts, and all this finalizing in a third world war subplot. The early 80s were the era of a ‘second Cold War’ entering a new phase, a nuclear crisis which could lead to World War Three, which is implied by the final carnage between the secret services and the aftermath. Extremely theatrical, like a lot of the rest of the film, it’s very much in the ‘postmodern’ style of the French Neobaroque. For me,
Possession
is one of the most prophetic movies for the 1980s, predicting the Polish Martial Law of the 1981 and the great depression that followed.

Żuławski’s genius was to see the personal drama as political, and the visceral and the sexual as coming from the social and political oppression. Incredibly stylish, haunted with beauty and austerity, it’s a world torn between Marx and Coca-cola (with Anna in one scene smashing the portraits of the classics of Marxism) and Żuławski is not necessarily a Marxist. The choices of many in that generation, and later - which they made as soon as capitalism entered Poland - wore serious traces of reacting over a trauma. Still, Żuławski remains a Romantic: revealing that love is the darkness, against the common, desexualized, sanitized convictions within capitalism.

Berlin serves here as a House of Fear, but at the same time, a threshold of Europe – not many dare to go further east. You’re not in real danger, but close enough to feel it. If you’re a foreigner, then you only feel the thrill of it. Often in Żuławski we have the situation of a house or a family unit, isolated drastically from the rest of the world, which contrasts with the upheaval and the dissolution of the world around them. there’s a war going on and people slaughtered, but we rather watch the main characters’ anguish
about their wife’s death or infidelity, families plagued with incest and self hatred. It bears a strong resemblance to a compulsive ritual, an acting-out of a traumatized subject. “Zulawski” must’ve seen something there in Lvov and never forgot it. His family torn apart there, he re-enacts it in every film, seeing it behind every atrocity, and as egocentric as it may be, it’s also visionary: to see the nations fall within the destruction on the basic, human level.

The 1980s was the time of a real nuclear danger with its double dip Cold War, raising to the extreme the anxieties of an already paranoid popular culture. An example of a B class even if enjoyable punk-Cold War paranoia exploitation flick is
Decoder
(1984) by the mysterious Muscha, boasting the participation of several icons of the underground: Christiane F. pairs with William Burroughs as two junkies in hallucinatory, abandoned dystopian Hamburg. Unusually not set in Berlin, this punky Gotham City is managed by criminals, putting the citizens into a trance through a poisonous muzak. This is interrupted by a rebellious DJ working for the corpo (played by FM Einheit from Einstürzende Neubauten), who works on an anti-muzak formula, which instead of pushing into submission, politically activates and radicalizes the youth. The riots emerge on the street of every German town.