Possession

"We are all the same. Different words, different bodies, different versions. Like insects! Meat!"Andrzej Żuławski isn’t filming a mere marital breakup. He’s portraying his own exorcism: the calvary and depression triggered by his divorce. It’s essentially an autobiography. From the very beginning, the couple is presented to us with a clear separation. We don’t know exactly what happened, but they’re not well together. The only thing that binds them is their child. Although, in truth, not even that: Anna shows a total disconnection from motherhood and, above all, from her husband and from love. We later discover that, while her husband Mark was away on a work trip, she gave herself over to pleasure with a lover, Heinrich. And at the same time, she cheats on that lover with another lover—a cephalopod monster, almost Lovecraftian. The protagonists despise each other so much that they no longer enjoy each other’s company at all. They don’t enjoy talking, they don’t enjoy having sex, not even spending time with their child. Anna, in particular, can’t bear Mark even touching her. He, however—though he hates her too—pursues her in the hope that she’ll show him that lost desire again. There’s a moment when Mark is so desperate for physical contact that he begs Anna to slap him several times. The colors also reflect the emotional/physical states the protagonists are going through. Their fights and arguments take place in their cold, blue house, while Anna rediscovers her yellowed passion in the Kreuzberg apartment with her various lovers. Some draw an analogy between the monster and Anna’s most primitive, insatiable carnal desire, since tentacles are a phallic symbol, representing multiple penises needed to satisfy our protagonist. But I think there’s another interpretation as well. I believe it also represents the revulsion Mark feels (due to his fragile ego) towards the man with whom his wife is cheating. He sees him as an enemy, something filthy, repulsive, inhuman. A monster. This stems from nothing other than a poisonous need to compare himself to other men. Knowing that his wife prefers Heinrich, our protagonist feels inferior, and he projects that insecurity onto this other man in the form of hatred. Another sociological phenomenon apparent in the film is the emotional energy theory (yes i made up that name). Birds of a feather flock together. It’s a fact. Both protagonists are unhinged, depressed, unstable. It’s the only reason they remain a couple. No one in their right mind would pair up with either of them. They literally resort to self-harm after an argument. Only one lunatic can stand another lunatic. In other words, it makes no sense to say “my partner is crazy/toxic!😔😡” Guess what: YOU CHOSE TO BE WITH THAT PERSON!!! A subtle political message is the critique of communism. The madder the protagonists become, the closer the film is shot to the Berlin Wall. In fact, when Mark enters Anna’s apartment and goes completely insane, the camera focuses on East Berlin. This critique is understandable, given that the Polish communist regime, under Deputy Minister J. Wilhelmi, censored and sabotaged Żuławski’s work, driving him into exile. The doppelgängers we see of Anna and Mark are also very interesting. They are the respective idealizations of our protagonists. Anna dreams of her husband being more present and sexually satisfying her. Mark dreams of his wife being more demure and devoted to the home. Thus, each creates an unreal version of their partner, both coming to life as doubles with green eyes. The problem is that the protagonists feed so much on these idealizations that (SPOILERS) they completely detach from the real world, dying at the end of the film. All of the described sentimental chaos and disaster leads to a war. One fought with the most powerful weapon: your mind. At the end of the film, bombs fall, destroying the entire city as a symbol of the protagonists’ emotional (and inevitably physical) collapse. You could say that Anna was possessed by lust, and Mark by jealousy. When both are dying on the spiral staircase, they seem to have a brief moment of clarity, like those conversations with your ex about what went wrong in the relationship and how you could have fixed it. That’s what the final scene appears to be. Mark and Anna kiss as a symbol of complicity and mutual understanding (finally). (Not so) Fun fact: For the breakdown scene in the subway, the director told Isabelle Adjani, “Imagine you’re having sex with the air”. This, combined with Jerzy Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre” doctrine, gave us the most insane and iconic scene in the film—so intense that it left a mark on the actress, who attempted to take her own life when she saw it a year later.