“Let’s Scare Jessica To Death” (1971)
“I don’t have highbrow illusions about what I’m doing… What we’re talking about on set is ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’ and ‘Carnival of Souls’… That’s by most standards ‘low’ cinema.” So said Perry when we spoke to him at the Berlinale, and he’s certainly right as far as this 1971 title from director John Hancock goes. Proof positive that not everything that is rehabilitated as a cult classic necessarily deserves the treatment, it is still possible to see where the influence lies on “Queen of Earth,” especially in terms of setting —lakesides and bedrooms feature prominently, and the final shot of Perry’s film eerily mimics the first shot of ‘Jessica’— while also noting that “great” might be a bit of stretch as a descriptor here. It’s not without its moments, but it can also be rather dull, muddled and unsatisfying from a narrative standpoint, as Jessica (Zohra Lampert), recently released from a mental institution, is brought to recuperate at her new Connecticut farmhouse home by her husband (Barton Heyman) and hippie friend (Kevin O’Connor). But a mysterious, seductive redhead, Emily (Mariclare Costello), who may or may not be some sort of vampire, is already living there and ends up staying: she’s part houseguest, part houseghost. Meantime, Jessica starts seeing visions of a little blonde girl; the odd, reticent townspeople all sport neck wounds; and every time anyone goes swimming, a hand tries to pull them under the water. None of it adds up to much at the end, despite a twist that was much better achieved in Altman’s “Images” the following year, yet there are some pleasantly shivery moments along the way, as well as an atmosphere of sexual threat and confusion as Emily’s predatory nature is revealed, and all the men in Jessica’s life succumb to her charms, leaving her with no one to rely on but her own hallucinating, degenerating mind.
“Persona” (1966)
Similar to “Queen of Earth,” Ingmar Bergman’s mysterious, beautiful “Persona” is a film about how two women could feasibly serve —in a metaphorical sense, anyway— as two divided halves of the same identity. Now recognized as an unshakable classic in the firmament of 20th century filmmaking, the film moves with effortless grace, from a start that summons the birth of cinema in its opening moments to the death of love and language in its fathomless, haunting later passages. The great Liv Ullmann —who would go on to work with Bergman repeatedly, in the deconstructionist drama “The Passion of Anna,” the sadly under-seen “Autumn Sonata” and “Scenes from a Marriage”— plays Elisabet, a once-great screen actress who suddenly stops speaking one day, a condition which defies medical diagnosis, while warm, wounded Bibi Andersson plays Alma, Elisabet’s nurse. “Persona” is really about the intertwining of these two women spiritually and metaphysically, as their roles shuttle back and forth between friend-friend, mother-daughter, caretaker-patient and boss-employee. And as also seen in “Queen of Earth,” “Persona” trades in suffocating close-ups of its two lead actresses, a technique that exposes their physical visages as roadmaps of inner struggle and concealed secrets, often by using overlapping profiles. The characters here expound long, painful monologues about events that dictated the rest of their lives: Alma’s recollection of her first sexual encounter on a beach —one that occurred alongside her friend and two other boys— is unforgettable. Perhaps Bergman’s most radically poetic film, its images possess a potency that speaks volumes: a spider crawling across a camera lens; a young boy reaching out into the throbbing white void; Anderson and Ullman’s face delicately juxtaposed as though they were two halves of the same whole. This is a film that looks right into you as you watch it.
“Repulsion” (1965)
Roman Polanski’s golden run, from his nasty debut “Knife in the Water” to the cinematic landmark “Chinatown,” saw the Polish auteur delving into often sordid subject material, ranging from cuckolding to masochism to rape to devil worship and beyond. “Repulsion,” the director’s second feature film, is a painful and often terrifying look at one woman’s slow unraveling, and the mental and emotional wounds that allow her to wilt into despair. It’s certainly not Polanski’s most technically accomplished picture —although the very fine Criterion restoration of the film is about as good as you’re likely to get when it comes to audio and visual quality— but it might be his most visceral. Catherine Deneuve plays Carol, a brittle, withdrawn young woman who works at a nail salon in swinging ’60s London. Sex terrifies her. Everywhere she goes, she is met with the sinister, leering gazes of boorish male specimens wishing to do her harm and to somehow prey upon her. She suffers from visions of attackers in her sleep. Even her seemingly kind sister brings home her boyfriend and has uncomfortably loud sex in the adjacent room. What’s particularly unnerving about “Repulsion” is the way in which Polanski uses the physical decay of the interiors as a sort of neat metaphor for his heroine’s dwindling mental state. A growing crack in the wallpaper or an increasingly grotesque-looking plate of skinned rabbit serve as chilling reminders of the tenuousness of our own sanity and the dangers of isolation. “Repulsion” is one of Polanski’s most disturbing pictures (which is really saying something if you’ve ever seen “Cul de Sac” or “The Tenant”) and it’s an unofficial bible/essential reference point if you want to make a movie about a young woman slowly losing her mind. At the very least, we guarantee you won’t ever look at a shaving razor in the same way again.