Catherine Deneuve – { feuilleton }

Repulsion locations

More Polanskiana. This film location site made the tracking down of locations in Repulsion (1965) an easy business. I was hoping they might have an entry for The Tenant, much of which is filmed around the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris but the only other Polanski entries are for Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. No matter, one thing I like about the outdoor scenes in Repulsion is the views of South Kensington which Polanski fixed a year or so before Donovan was celebrating the area in a rather more positive manner. I have fond memories of South Kensington in the 1970s since it was the area we stayed in every February during an annual school trip. Barring a slight change of street furniture, the busy traffic island outside the Tube station looked just the same when we were there.

The exterior of Kensington Mansions in Trebovir Road, the location for Carol’s apartment. I’d always thought this was in a street near the Tube station but it’s actually some distance away in Earl’s Court.

Colin (John Fraser) and Carol (Catherine Deneuve).

The hair salon where Carol works is Thurloe’s in Thurloe Place, and the shop in question is still a hair salon. Google’s Street Views were taken in May 2012 so the flags are out for the Queen’s Jubilee.

Just down the road from Thurloe’s is the Hoop & Toy, the pub where Carol’s would-be boyfriend, Colin, goes drinking with his misogynist friends.

The traffic island outside the Tube station which in the latest Street View was still looking like a building site. The most surprising thing about the row of shops around the Tube station is that Dino’s, a restaurant visible in some of the film shots, is still there almost fifty years later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Polanski details
• Repulsion posters
• Through the Wonderwall

Repulsion posters

More Roman Polanski. The BFI is running a season of the director’s work through January and February so Repulsion (1965) and Chinatown (1974) have been put back into circulation nationwide. I don’t live in London but I have a large number of Polanski’s films on DVD so it looks like this month will also see a mini-season in south Manchester. Anchor Bay released a set of Polanski’s first three films (plus a disc of his short works) a few years ago, a great collection whose only flaw was a lack of Jan Lenica’s poster art for Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac (1966). I don’t know what posters are being used to promote the new release of Repulsion but something using Lenica’s artwork would seem essential.

The colour and brush style of the prone figure is very typical of Lenica but when combined with either the Clarendon typeface in the British example above, or the blocky lettering for the French poster, a Saul Bass-like design appears. The gender and eye symbols in the hand-drawn lettering reinforce a resemblance which I’d guess was deliberate. The title sequence for Repulsion, with the credits sliding across a close view of Catherine Deneuve’s eyeball, could almost have been created by Bass; the director’s credit (below) requires no further argument.

Continue reading “Repulsion posters”

Images by Robert Altman

It’s taken a while but the DVD format has slowly followed the CD with the reissue of obscure works that have been out of circulation for far too long. Robert Altman’s blandly-titled Images has been on my “When The Hell Will I See That Again?” list for about 25 years, having been shown a couple of times on TV in the UK before vanishing into the cinematic ether. It’s been out on DVD (Region 1 only) for a few years now but it’s taken me this long to see it again. In a way the film’s elusiveness suits a drama concerned with hallucinations.

Altman made Images in 1972 between two films that received far more attention and acclaim, the eccentric Western, McCabe and Mrs Miller and his Raymond Chandler update, The Long Goodbye. Images seems to have been poorly-received at the time although Susannah York deservedly won a best actress award at Cannes. Today it comes across as a minor exercise in mastery of the medium equivalent to Francis Coppola’s deft delivery of The Conversation between Godfathers 1 and 2. And, like The Conversation, it’s only “minor” because of the scale of Altman’s other achievements. For many directors this would be a career peak.

Images is a kind of Altmanesque riposte to Roman Polanki’s Repulsion. Both films concern women having trouble with the men in their lives which may or may not be the cause of a mental breakdown which becomes progressively worse throughout the film. Polanski’s take on this far is more overt, with Catherine Deneuve already withdrawn from the world at the outset. Susannah York’s character, Cathryn, is a children’s writer who seems at first to be relatively stable until her life is increasingly intruded upon by the ghost of a former (dead) lover and other hallucinations from her past. This is played out in and around a cottage in a spectacular part of Ireland where she’s staying with her husband. Most of Altman’s films go for laughs even when the subject matter is inherently serious. Images, along with a handful of his other works, has no leavening humour at all and, like Repulsion, crosses into all-out horror at times. Unfortunately this makes it difficult to discuss without spoiling the film’s many surprises.

Seeing this again was essentially like seeing it for the first time, not least because it’s a widescreen film that I only ever saw on TV in an inferior pan-and-scan version. The photography was by Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the great cinematographers of the 1970s and Altman’s favourite cameraman at that time. The production design is filled with mirrors, glass and wind-chimes, all of which complement Cathryn’s brittle mental state and which continually catch her in their reflections. The music by a pre-bombast John Williams is very good and is superbly augmented by Stomu Yamash’ta whose percussion ensemble is credited with the unnerving “sounds” which contribute so much to the atmosphere. Susannah York’s performance is excellent and serves as a reminder of what a great actress she was, frequently making the most of difficult roles in films such as The Killing of Sister George, The Maids or The Shout.

The screenplay for Images was all Altman’s work apart from Cathryn’s voiceovers where she reads (or writes in her head) parts of her novel. These were extracts from a real fantasy book for children, In Search of Unicorns, written by the actress, one of two she wrote in the 1970s. Those extracts add to the verisimilitude as well as being sufficiently naive and otherworldly to contrast with the very adult events being shown on the screen.

So I can finally tick this one off the list although I now have an urge to see Altman’s curious and not altogether successful science fiction film, Quintet. No. 1 on the “When The Hell Will I See That Again?” list remains Deep End from 1971, the first British film by Jerzy Skolimowski who later made The Shout. According to a recent Sight & Sound feature the film is caught in some legal limbo so I could still be in for a long wait.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Altman, 1925–2006