| Sometimes, I’m just a sucker for overacting. There are few pleasures in life quite like seeing an award-winning actor throwing restraint out the window and just letting fly with a hand wringing, eye-rolling, frothing-at-the-mouth emotional meltdown. In Possession (1981), Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani vibrate with glorious, uncontrollable dementia right from the beginning. The results are either exhausting or riveting, depending on your point of view.
Neill and Adjani play Mark and Anna, a married couple going through the bitterest breakup in movie history. Seriously, these two make The War of the Roses look like The Philadelphia Story. Screaming and furniture-hurling lead to self-mutilation via electric carving knife, which leads to tender reconciliation, which leads to a savage beating and separation. And that’s just the first 10 minutes. Then they both go completely berserk.
Mark tracks down Anna’s effete 60-year-old lover Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), who hints that Anna has been cheating on him, too, before kicking Mark’s ass with his own brand of old man ballet/karate. Sore and humiliated, Mark hires a private detective to find out where Anna goes when she’s not with him or Heinrich. It turns out that her newest lover is a slimy tentacled monster, but the detective doesn’t live to tell the tale. Other victims pile up, Heinrich and Mark find out about Anna’s octopoidal boyfriend, and everything builds to an astonishing, surreal climax.
Possession is ignored by most, loathed by some and revered by others. Intrigued by the level of passion with which critics loved or hated it, I tracked down a VHS copy of the "82-minute" version (actually closer to 76 minutes) and found it impressive yet disappointing. The plot was incoherent, and the sound quality was so poor I missed out on half of the dialogue. When I found out that my version was missing almost 50 minutes of footage (!!!), I became cautiously curious about the uncut version, which finally got released by Anchor Bay in 2000. As you might guess, the two versions are almost completely different films. The Anchor Bay release restores the 123-minute running time, places shuffled scenes in their original order, and sharpens up the picture and sound. The film is still quite baffling at first, but is certainly more coherent than it was, and I found myself enjoying it a lot. It improves with repeated viewings, especially if your first viewing was missing more than over a third of the story.
At this point, I’d like to highlight some differences between the short and long versions of Possession. I’d post a spoiler alert here, but I suspect that in a movie as confusing as this one, knowing more about the plot can only improve the film, not spoil it.
· In the complete version, Mark’s employers mention a mysterious "Man in Pink Socks," who actually appears much later in the film. This character is completely missing from the shorter cut.
· The notorious nervous breakdown/monster miscarriage scene in a subway tunnel seems identical in both versions, except for one detail – in the short version, flashes of the monster and of a Jesus statue are cut in, and Anna sees eyeballs growing in the palms of her hands like stigmata. This seems to be the only footage that’s in the short version but not the long one.
· One of my favourite additions to the 123-minute cut is the scene in which Mark gets his revenge on his cuckolder, Heinrich. The long version reveals a cruel and elaborate murder plot, which suddenly occurs to Mark while listening to Heinrich’s blackmail demands. While Heinrich is distracted, Mark plugs a toilet with a shoe and puts a feather down his own throat to induce vomiting. When Heinrich comes to his aid, Mark knocks him cold with the ceramic lid from the toilet tank. Then he drowns Heinrich in the flooded toilet, steals his wallet, replaces the tank lid and sprinkles the area with drugs to give the appearance of an accidental death. All that remains from this scene in the short version is the bonked head, which looks painful but not fatal, and gives the impression that Mark simply gave in to a sudden childish impulse.
· Just before the hallucinatory climax, the long version includes a weird scene in which Mark hijacks a taxi, crashes it into a police car and gets shot.
· In the short version, when Anna climbs up the stairwell with her monster lover (who has now evolved into a clone of Mark), Mark seems to shoot her, and they both die, ending the film. In the long version, we can clearly see he’s shooting the clone, but the bullet passes through and ricochets several times, hitting Anna and Mark.
· The long version finishes with the Mark clone returning home, to form a new family with Mark’s son Bob, and Bob’s teacher Helen, who looks just like Anna. Bob is so upset at the thought of living through it all again with doppelganger parents, he drowns himself in the bathtub.
Wow! Weird movie, eh? I’m surprised that most people only think of it as "that movie where Isabelle Adjani has sex with an octopus." Well, maybe not that surprised. The DVD contains the complete version plus director’s commentary from Andrzej Zulawski, and Anchor Bay’s most recent version puts it all on a double bill with Lamberto and Mario Bava’s outstanding Shock (a.k.a. Beyond the Door II) (1977) at a reduced price. Value! |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.