The Tenant

Normally a great fan of Roman Polanski's work, I must confess that I just didn't get The Tenant. The story details a Pole living in Paris taking over the apartment of a woman who jumped out of the window of said apartment. The apartment has some strange power in it and quickly transforms the new tenant's life for the worse...in fact things literally fall apart for him. Polanski plays the Pole and does a serviceable job. I always thought he was a pretty decent actor. The people living in the apartment building are equally good and bizarre with Shelley Winters standing out as the concierge. Polanski also does a rather deft job behind the camera creating tension and a foreboding feeling in many scenes. What then is the problem? It has to be the weird script which hints at story lines and never really explains any of the action, particularly the ending. I just didn't buy the outcome. Why did it happen? Why was there a tooth in the wall(an effective scene if not an unexplained one)? I can't go into to much detail about the fate that befalls Polanski's character, but it seems to come out of nowhere. I know this film is revered by many as one of the great horror films of all time. I never was scared by anything except the convoluted plot being taken seriously. Maybe the film is trying to be too enigmatic and symbolic. I don't know, but what I do know is The Tenant left me with an unsatisfied feeling. It certainly isn't a bad film, but I didn't think it was great either. There were large tracts within that were just plain boring, and though Polanski is definitely one of the greatest directors of all time - he can and has been guilty of downplaying scenes too much. I can say the same for some of the scenes in Repulsion. I also believe that this film needs to be seen more than once, but I will definitely have to work up to that chore another time. As with much of Polanski's work, there is a dose of black humour laced throughout. I really enjoyed the scenes of Polanski's character seeing the woman who jumped out of the window in hospital almost completely covered with bandages. He visits not for concern for the girl but with hopes that she will die and he will land her apartment. These scenes are underlined with a very dark, amusing edge and an appropriate irony to the film's denouement.

What can be said, really... "The Tenant" is a first-class thriller wrought with equal amounts of suspense and full-blown paranoia. It's an intricately-plotted film--every detail seems included for a reason--even though the plot seldom makes sense, and much of it is never even addressed in an objective manner. Therefore we are left with the increasingly unstable Trelkovsky (Polanski)--a meek Polish man who has obtained an apartment due to the previous tenant's suicide--to guide us through a world of escalating fear and uncertainty. After an apartment-warming party thrown by a group of obnoxious coworkers, Trelkovsky comes under increased, seemingly inexplicable scrutiny by the fellow occupants in his building; the rest of the film chronicles his mental deterioration and gives us a thorough mindfu*k on par with the later efforts of David Lynch. "The Tenant," however, is more brooding and sinister, laced with unexpected comic relief, fine performances, and a truly haunting score. It's a movie that's better experienced than described, so hop to it.

How can I be so devoted to this film? I'm a fairly ordinary person with a very regular life, so, why am I drawn to this darkness. "The Tenant", "Rosemary's Baby", "Kiss Of The Spider Woman", "Apartment Zero" are films I've seen many, many times. All of them terrifying in their own way. Last night, I saw "The Tenant" again for the nth time. I was as riveted and unsettled as I was the very first time I saw it. There is something about playing with our inner-fears without actually confirm or deny anything that makes it a genre of its own. A provocation of sorts. If Polansky is unique behind the camera he is also remarkable in front of it. His performance here is a tragic-comic creation of the first order. For film lovers all over the world, this is a real must see!

This is a wonderfully tense and intensely claustrophobic film with a slowly escalating and relentless psychologically terror. Roman Polanski stays true to his style from Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion. But this movie is more than a simple examination of the onset of insanity from within the person who is experiencing it. The theme of loneliness and the sense of purposeless petty existence are the real backdrop of this excellent work, the fact which makes it similar to Kubrick's Shining. Still, The Tenant has deeper literary roots. In my opinion, the inspiration for this movie came right from the great works of European literature -- the influence of Edgar A. Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolai Gogol is simply obvious. Poe's tales of madness out of loneliness, Hoffmann's stories of tragic delirium (most prominently, The Sandman, Majorat, and The Mines of Falun), and, of course, Gogol's eerie The Overcoat provided Polanski with the inspiration for this modern examination of the same topics.

Trelkovsky, a French citizen of Polish origin, is a nondescript and unassuming loner who moves into an apartment the previous occupant of which, a young woman, has thrown herself out of the window. The building is owned by the stern and ice-cold old man, who is hell bent on making sure his tenants do not make any noise and do not cause any trouble. He (and his underlings in the building) consider any sign of life to be "trouble." The old man spends much of his time enforcing a near-police-state-like order within the building. Undeniably, all kind of extremely weird things are going on in the building and I will not dwell on them. But it is the strange intrusiveness of the police-state which injects real terror into Trelkovsky's life. Faced with absurdity after absurdity, he makes some meek attempts to complain and ask for explanations: instead, noone is even ready to listen to him -- he is being treated like a piece of dirt practically by everyone.

It is also important that Trelkovsky's plunge into madness occurs suddenly and very abruptly. It seems almost like a psychological breakdown and a rebellion at the same time. He has lived the life of conformity, compliance, and quite resentment, never able to stand his ground or even establish his individual sovereignty. Trelkovksy's meekness is simply striking. His sudden and violent obsession with not letting "them" make him into the previous occupant of the flat is a pathological and concentrated reaction to the years of pent up passive aggression and anger. The infernal scream at the end of the film is the wild shout of anguish. In a certain sense, the completely unexpected finale of the film presents a huge puzzle which is not really intended to be resolved. But Polanski seems to be investing it with important symbolic meaning. This world is full of multiple Trelkovskys, little, unnoticeable people terrorized by their own sense of total insignificance. This is a vicious cycle of dependence between people's unconscious yet compulsive cruelty to each other and the tortured compliance with this cruelty by others.

This is an excellent, dark and captivating film in the best traditions of European psychological Gothic literature. I strongly recommend to watch this movie and take a look at Poe's, Hoffmann's and Gogol's stories.

Meek, tiny, almost insignificant. Polanski finds the invisibility of his characters and makes something enormous out of it. In front and behind the camera he creates one of the most uncomfortable masterpieces I had the pleasure to see and see and see again. It never let's me down. People, even people who know me pretty well, thought/think there was/is something wrong with me, based on my attraction, or I should say, devotion for "Le Locataire" They may be right, I don't know but there is something irresistibly enthralling within Polanski's darkness and I haven't even mentioned the humor. The mystery surrounding the apartment and the previous tenant, the mystery that takes over him and, naturally, us, me. That building populated by great old Academy Award winners: Melvyn Douglas, Shelley Winters, Jo Van Fleet, Lila Kedrova. For anyone who loves movies, this is compulsory viewing. One, two, three, many, many viewings.