Psycho. #36

Do you think that a great artist may be an inconsistent director that only has one masterpiece in them?

When I first watched Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), my initial thought was ‘my god, this guy Zulawski is on the cutting edge of cinema’. I thought that there was a treasure trove of masterpieces to be found. What I got instead was a very frustrating filmography. His French films didn’t land for me, they felt very ‘in the weeds’ because he was trying to adapt to French cinema. I have respect for his native Polish films, but they were either incomplete (On The Silver Globe, 1988) or overblown even by his standards (Diabel) or simply great but not Possession level great (In The Third Part of the Night, 1971).

I came to the conclusion that ultimately a movie like Possession was right place, right time with the perfect collaborators. But most important, it’s the film that has his best accumulation of ideas and neurosis. At least for me. There’s such an intellectual madness to it. So a huge respect for him as an auteur but I have to acknowledge his big flaws as a filmmaker in his career, which might be a contradiction or ignorance on my behalf.

I fell prey to a horrible fear a few days ago, when your letter dropped, that there is in fact only one person sending me questions every week and that that person, therefore, is you. I remembered that I had already received a similar “more of a statement than a question” question at some point during my work for this column, and the terrible thought hit me: am I just in dialogue with one person, week after week? Are you standing outside my flat right now, thumbing a message in to Animus about Kieslowski? “Do you think it’s true,” you write, as you stare through my windows with a pair of battered binoculars, “that there is such a thing as a proto-European ‘soul’ evident in post-war cinema, particularly that of the East?” Are you in fact planning to Single-White-Female me in the year of our Lord 2025, gaining access to my emails and dashing off columns in my guise, while I sit there shouting in vain, tied to my bedroom chair? “Andie MacDowell is a great actor,” you read out loud while typing. “So is Demi Moore.” I scream into the necktie you have stuffed into my mouth: “No! No! Stop!” But nothing can be done. Tears of rage and frustration pour down my cheeks as you sign off, with a flourish: “But the best actor of all is Clive Owen.”

Sorry… where was I? Ah yeah, Zulawski, and the question of lightning striking once. I think the idea is a good one, but I don’t necessarily agree in terms of Zulawski himself. Partly, I don’t know his work all that well — my cinephilia has limits, OK! — and partly, I don’t think Possession is so phenomenal, nor so much greater than the other Zulawski film I’ve seen (That Most Important Thing: Love, 1975) as to support your thesis.

Certainly Possession feels the more completely inhabited of the two, and it benefits greatly from having a more realised conceit; its story and its adoption of horror tropes are highly dialectical, and there is a greater lyricism, maybe, to the unhingedness we’re watching. Adjani is very much on the level of Zulawski, in her intensity that is always right on — or even over — the edge of ‘too much’: she starts the film at 100% and somehow gets bigger and bigger, rather like Judy Garland singing ‘San Francisco’ on her Carnegie Hall album. How can this performance grow from a place of such hugeness?