If you want, I’m the bad one. Secret agent Mark’s (Sam Neill) returns home to Berlin from a mission to find his unhappy wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) is leaving him. She asks him for a divorce and he hires a private investigator (Carl Duering) to find she is co-habiting with exotic Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). Meanwhile, he begins an affair with his young son Bobby’s (Michael Hogben) teacher Helen who is Anna’s lookalike and what the detective finds is far more disturbing than evidence of an affair … Does our subject still wear pink socks? A devastating portrait of marital breakdown, made during the director’s own divorce: think Kramer vs. Kramer crossed with Rosemary’s Baby and The Brood with added gore. When Andrzej Zulawski died in 2016 he had just won Best Director at Locarno for what was his final film, Cosmos. In a typically insightful obituary Ronald Bergan wrote of the controversialist’s films: “They externalise high emotions and create a nightmarish world, often tipping over into grotesque humour; they have strong, though unconventional, narrative structures; and they are shot with virtuosity.” Isn’t it interesting that the three Polish directors who wound up in exile, including Polanski and Borowczyk, all wound up making such extraordinary excursions into Grand Guignol? Arguably, this is the best of them but with Zulawski there was the added dimension of ideological (anti-communist) meaning which gave his output distribution problems. Just feel the outpouring of the senses in the determinedly unsensual surroundings of grim Cold War Berlin with a wonderfully odd Bennent a devilish incarnation of sexual temptation and the old Gothic apartment a lair of death and demons in stark contrast with the more surgical surroundings of the marital home. The Wall is a clear signifier of lewd horrors but both properties are close to it, in West Berlin and Kreuzberg. Bergan likens Adjani’s unforgettable miscarriage scene to an operatic aria; he’s not wrong. Her extraordinary, showy performance earned her the Best Actress award at Cannes as well as the Cesar. (It also led her to a suicide attempt). But Neill is tremendous too as the paranoid spy in a story of doppelgangers, surveillance, sex and horror, both physical and psychological. It was Zulawski’s sole English-language film and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. Co-written with Frederic Tuten. A cult classic. She’s like the Angel of Death – the one who kills people
mondomovies 