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Epic Choice: Possession (1981) | Full Episode Reaction (Patreon)

Published:
2023-09-06 16:00:08
Imported:
2023-12
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Most bizarre movie I’ve ever seen, hands down. Thanks Kelvin for this selection, I think 🤣

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g g gooding

Sam Neill from Possession is in The Hunt for Red October with Joss 🍎 Ackland. 🎤 💧

Kelvin

A set of long posts coming lol So some basic context from what I can recall is that this film is (obviously) rather personal regarding the director's own messy divorce but something that also shadows the film is the director's stated reasoning of the film also being about his estrangement/separation from his native country of Communist Poland during the Cold War. Incidentally I was watching a pretty abstract sci-fi film this year which I found confusing but in a way I kind of appreciated even though the dialogue was extremely strange and the direction was really odd for me. The characters would just go into long monologues for which the audience had little to no context and it was constantly shifting in unknown stretches of time after scenes. I mentioned it to a friend and she replied that it sounded interesting and then a few minutes later when looking the director up she said something like "oh, that weirdness you're describing makes sense. He directed Possession." For a second I was like, "what, no way, this is a completely different film" but when i thought more about the dialogue, and the choices that were being made I realized it was actually very much the same director behind the wheel. That film, On the Silver Globe, was actually one of the films he was shooting before he was forced to leave in the late 70s and basically lost a bunch of footage in the process. I bring this up to say this: On the Silver Globe is a weeeeird film. It's a sci fi flick that takes place on an unknown planet with a small cast meeting native peoples where the film can just shift suddenly in time as mentioned and suddenyl a character you were following is dead for some time for unknown reasons, characters expound into long monologues (there's a lot of talking in possession but it felt like there was twice as much dialogue and monologuing in that film somehow) which deal directly with heavy topics like faith and death, and because of the lost footage there are literally segments of minutes where the director abruptly cuts from the finished footage to unrelated footage of his city's streets where he has to literally tell the audience the script and describe what happens in a sort of "this character says this, then he fires his gun. The other character dies, then there is a period of mourning." So when I heard he was also behind Possession, I decided to rewatch it some time after because I remembered this film being more easy to follow. And I know that I realized that on the rewatch, I actually *still* think this movie is crazier and harder to understand intent at times. I think based on the two films I've watched from him, this director, Żuławski, has three main elements that make his stuff so bizarre:

Kelvin
>>116976258

1) A lot of full-fledged visual metaphor which can be interpreted multiple ways. 2) Complete willingness to mix metaphors in his art 3) Very flowery language in his dialogue So stuff like the whole spy plot and the guys shooting down the main character could be interpreted as the director's own fears/tensions with spies/police in his own country, but it's also very much mixing with the more direct *other* metaphor of divorce and the damage it does in the process which I think is really the heart of this film, which leaves a pretty disorienting feeling here. Then there's the dialogue you have going on at the same time which may be proposing something tied to the whole metaphor in terms like the Mom's talk about death and her son but in a more oblique way. All I can say is it makes for a super surreal type of film style which I haven't seen much of elsewhere and you can really pull things from in a lot of different ways. The monster is disgusting, an intruder, but at the end, the monster is Sam Neill. Is the monster just a metaphor for "the other man" which also supplants Heinrich. Maybe it's the *idea* of the other man, where Anna will be with and which means ultimately she belongs to no man. Maybe it's inhuman because with such a direct emotional connection, Mark can only see any potential other lovers Anna takes as grotesque, a mockery, beyond humanity in form and function. Maybe it looks like Sam Neill in the end as a sign that he's been fully replaced, obsolete, or maybe it looks like him as some other form of childbirth metaphor, because she did give birth to him in story. The ending could be a direct sign of Cold War tensions, nuclear war personified. Or maybe it's just the dramatic feeling that comes with the ending of such a huge relationship as a marriage in the eyes of one of the participants. Maybe the fact that Helen looks exactly like his wife (she is in fact the same actress who plays Anna) is a sign of Mark's own attempts to find rebound relationships. Maybe the fact that the replacement Sam Neill and the replacement Anna are the only ones alive at the end has some meaning as well. You could go on for ages, and I like that a bunch.