Roman Polanski's The Tenant [1976]

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The Tenant (1976)

Le locataire (original title)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074811/

The Tenant (French: Le Locataire) is a 1976 psychological thriller/horror film directed by Roman Polanski based upon the 1964 novel Le locataire chimérique by Roland Topor. It is also known under the French title Le Locataire. It co-stars actress Isabelle Adjani. It is the last film in Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy", following Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. It was entered into the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.

Roman Polanski ... Trelkovsky
Isabelle Adjani ... Stella
Melvyn Douglas ... Monsieur Zy
Jo Van Fleet ... Madame Dioz
Bernard Fresson ... Scope
Lila Kedrova ... Madame Gaderian
Claude Dauphin ... Husband at the accident
Claude Piéplu ... Neighbor (as Claude Pieplu)
Rufus ... Georges Badar

Polanski receives no acting credit, despite the fact he plays the lead character.

While the main character is clearly paranoid to some extent (as exemplified in the scene when he believes a neighbour is strangling him, when he is in fact shown strangling himself), this film does not entirely reveal whether everything takes place in his head or if the strange events happening around him exist at least partially, contrary to the previous entries in Polanski's "apartment trilogy."

Roman Polanski's 1976 English-language, Paris-set creepfest was adapted from a novel by the French graphic artist Topor, but it may be the director's quintessential movie. It's an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby to Bitter Moonand The Pianist. Indeed, the movie is a true psychodrama: Polanski himself plays the eponymous protagonist, a furtive Polish-born Frenchman named Trelkovsky who rents the apartment of a recent suicide and is gradually driven mad by his mysteriously hostile neighbors.

Understated, at least at the beginning, The Tenantis also unrelenting as the hapless Trelkovsky is flummoxed or humiliated by one unsettling interaction after another. (The stellar international cast includes Isabelle Adjani, Shelley Winters, and Melvyn Douglas.) Naturally, The Tenant is a comedy inspired, perhaps, by the joke that Trelkovsky is nowhere at home (least of all in his own skin) or by the Kafka wisecrack "In the fight between you and the world, back the world."

The Tenant, perhaps Polanski's most personal work, is a darkly witty nightmare starring the director himself as a Parisian office worker who moves into an apartment recently vacated by a suicide victim. As he idly asks around about what happened, Polanski inadvertently irritates his friends and neighbors, who complain that the timid little man is too brash. Released on the heels of Chinatown, The Tenant was Polanski's attempt to return to the pointed surrealism of his early shorts and thereby reclaim his European New Wave credibility. Though the result is too slow and curious, with a weak lead performance by the writer-director, The Tenant's tone of abstracted anxiety is distinctive, and its central message, that the obnoxious define the world for everyone else, provides another tile in Polanski's career mosaic of paranoia and power brokerage.