Repulsion

Old ladies with the bad experiences + sister with the scary sex noises = men are monsters. KILL THEM!!! Except you desire them too, don't you? You desire monsters? Looks like...

Did like one particularly contrived frame. Lady and gent right and left, with the (spinster?) neighbour in between. The moral majority getting between the beautiful young lovers.

Some visual metaphors explained in the crudest possible terms: Leaning Tower of Pisa = massive cock. Moldy rabbit = sexuality gone sour. Cracks in the walls = cracks in yr hymen. And that's about enough of that!

The aged male gypsy band waddling across London = what? A bit of the old country in the middle of the city... Innocence crippled? Tradition lost?

The nunnery? Its bells urging chastity, constantly overruled... a pop at religion? Probably wasn't an easy target, back then.

We start with Carol's real eye and we end with her eye again, a photograph of her as a child (and what a creepy child!). Comment on art maybe? The real into reel? Wikipedia says it's child abuse, although I missed that inference. I dunno... ask Polanski. Then again, child rape might be a bit of an awkward subject to raise with him...

It's all mirrors and lights and twisting doorknobs and heavy breathing down the phone. Cliches so worn they kinda lose the impact they probably had in 1965. However, the hands / rapists coming out of the walls shocked EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's still got it, even after half a century. Pretty impressive, really.

The Ghost Writer

Hmm. So this Adam Lang character seems to share more than a little with Roman Polanski himself -- past crimes resurfacing, lawyers, trials and exile. Someone prone to reading into things (someone like myself for example) would start rummaging for clues. Indeed, I'm encouraged to do so by the film itself. Its truth is buried in code in Lang's ghosted memoirs. Is the audience's relationship to Polanski mirrored in Ewan McGregor's relationship to Lang? Both scrabbling to figure out the enigma they are faced with?

Polanski is not kind to Lang. And yet the film's resolution shifts the responsibility for his crimes to his wife. All very curious. Impossible to conjecture what Polanski may have encoded into his film/memoir, if anything. Maybe he's just playing games. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

But it's not like there's much else to do here. Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams put in sterling work as Tony and Cherie doppelgangers. But Ewan McGregor seemed pretty half-hearted. Perhaps the demands of the London accent was putting him down. Some of his lines were delivered abysmally. Kim Cattrall's accent was even worse, although she managed to overcome that limitation and put in a very convincing performance. Impressive achievement.

And satire? Please! The Prime Minister an agent of the CIA? Could you hit me over the head with that a little more? The whole thing is very silly, and much too long for how silly it was. Never boring, sure. This is Polanski. But not any kind of return to form either.