Five Fun Facts About Andrzej Zulawski's Possession
Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 Possession is one of cinema’s most mesmerizing and confounding masterpieces. It’s a film that defies easy categorization, combining elements of espionage thriller, relationship drama, and creature feature to concoct one of the most blistering, bonkers, and unhinged films about divorce ever made. Bolstered by career-defining performances from Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, and featuring one of the most bizarrely spellbinding sequences in modern cinema, Possession is a uniquely insane cinematic experience. As far as horror films go, it’s one of the most distinctly disturbing. It contains the kind of unsettling darkness and unforgettable terror that thoroughly gets under your skin. You’ve never seen anything quite like it, and once you’ve locked eyes with it, you can never look away. Even if you can’t make sense of it, you can never forget it…
A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.
The film has autobiographical origins.
When Żuławski began working on the film with co-writer Frederic Tuten, he was in a state of depression. He had recently gone through a divorce with actress Malgorzata Braunek (the Polish star of his first two movies), leaving him to take care of their son, Xawery. He had also been at odds with the Polish government and recently relocated to France, following an incident where they halted production on Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe and ordered that all of his sets be destroyed.
All of these events and feelings funneled into the division and dissolution that is so viscerally felt in Possession. “The film was my private life,” Żuławski says in The Other Side of the Wall, Daniel Bird’s documentary about the writing and filming of Possession. “I had no home, no family.”
Segments of the film are even a direct reflection of Żuławski’s life. He based the character of Anna on his ex-wife and the character of Heinrich on the New Age erotic martial artist that apparently somewhat resembles the physical person Malgorzata slept with. Żuławski even recalled how he once returned home late in the evening and found his five-year-old son alone in the apartment, smeared with jam, after his wife left him by himself for several hours — a scene that is vividly recreated in the film.
It was banned and heavily edited upon release.
Upon its initial release, the film was met with an onslaught of mixed or negative reviews. After its short-lived limited release in the UK, the film was promptly banned and labeled as one of the notorious “video nasties.”
The film’s lack of commercial success in Europe carried over into its US release, where it was neutered by a reedit. The US cut shaved off more than a third of its total runtime, and it almost completely eliminated the main theme of the disintegration of a marital relationship (which further muddled its meaning). This version was lambasted for its incoherence, leading it up be critically panned.
It wasn’t until 2000 when an uncut, original version was released on VHS and DVD (thanks to Anchor Bay Entertainment). This began to accrue a strong cult following, which ultimately lured critics back for a reappraisal.
The creature effects were done by the same guy who created E.T.
Possession’s tentacled monstrosity was designed by Carlo Rambaldi, the famous Italian special effects guru who created the animatronic head for Ridley Scott’s Alien. Rambaldi’s nightmare-inducing design is right in line with Alien’s dark imagery; however, Possession may’ve led Rambaldi to take on more light-hearted fare. Exactly one year later, he would give cinema enthusiasts the cute and cuddly extra-terrestrial, E.T., for Spielberg’s iconic 80s film.
It took Isabelle Adjani years to recover from the role.
The role of Anna was emotionally taxing for Adjani, who stated in one interview that it took her several years to recover. She also said she would never take on a similar role. It was even rumored that she attempted suicide after filming completed, which was later confirmed by Żuławski.
Adjani stated: “Possession is only the type of film you can do when you are young. [Zulawski] is a director that makes you sink into his world of darkness and his demons. It is okay when you are young, because you are excited to go there. His movies are very special, but they totally focus on women, as if they are lilies. It was quite an amazing film to do, but I got bruised, inside out. It was exciting to do. It was no bones broken, but it was like, 'How or why did I do that?' I don't think any other actress ever did two films with him.”
In the film’s most infamous scene — which Adjani calls “emotional pornography” — Anna has what appears to be a miscarriage in the Berlin subway. The sole line of direction she was given from Żuławski was: “fuck the air.”
It’s Sam Neill’s favorite movie he’s done.
Despite the toll it had taken on Adjani, Possession remains one of Sam Neill’s personal favorites out of all the films he’d starred in. Although, he also acknowledged the film’s physical and emotional difficulty. “It nearly killed me, but work with him was great,” he tweeted after the director’s passing in 2016.
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