Even before having to escape Hollywood because of rape and criminal conviction, Roman Polanski had been laying the groundwork to continue his career in the Old Continent. The first step in that process was The Tenant, the 1976 French horror drama that is often considered his most personal, but also his most misunderstood film.
The film is based on Le Locataire chimérique, a 1964 novel by Roland Topor, a French author known for his work in avant-garde literature, theatre and cinema. The protagonist, played by Polanski, is Trelkovsky, a Polish émigré living in Paris and working as a clerk. In search of proper accommodation, he learns about a building where one of the apartments could soon become empty. The Egyptologist Simone Choule, its tenant, has recently thrown herself out of the window and is likely to die of her injuries, thus allowing Trelkovsky to rent it. Before that happens, he begins visiting the bandaged Choule in hospital and also meets her friend Stella (played by Isabelle Adjani), a beautiful woman with whom he starts a tentative romantic relationship. Following Choule’s death, he moves into the apartment but soon begins noticing strange and disturbing details about his neighbours, who appear to chastise him over minor inconveniences like loud music or throwing a party for his friends. He gradually begins believing that his neighbours are conspiring against him and that they want him to suffer the same fate as Choule, whom he begins to mimic by smoking her brand of cigarettes, wearing make-up and women’s clothes, and ultimately having disturbing visions.
The Tenant is often considered the final part of Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” – three very different films with plots set in apartments that nominally belong to the horror genre (the other two are Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby). This film is often considered the weakest of the three or, at least, it was deemed as such at the time of its premiere, when most critics found it disappointing. This can be explained by Polanski using the script he co-wrote with his old associate Gérard Brach as an opportunity to exercise some of his very personal demons – childhood traumas of a Jew living in Nazi-occupied Poland and the tragic loss of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family in 1969. Polanski apparently became quite paranoid as a result, and this affected the characterisation of the protagonist. Trelkovsky, who is, like Polanski himself, a Polish immigrant living in France, is often met with derision and suspicion by native French people and reacts by seeing suspicion and malevolence everywhere. This gradually leads to his loss of sanity and, ultimately, identity, manifesting in a shocking ending. The concept could have worked, but Polanski at times becomes too enamoured with his own acting ability, and the dark humour occasionally makes The Tenant look like a parody of itself. Polanski also fails to exhibit proper chemistry with Isabelle Adjani, who is wasted in the scene where her character goes to watch Bruce Lee’s kung fu films at the cinema – a detail that is quite unnecessary for the plot itself, but that might appeal to viewers nostalgic for the 1970s. Over the years, The Tenant has become a popular subject of scholarly works, attempting to explain it through themes of anti-Semitism, the immigrant experience, or issues of sexual identity, and it has achieved something of a cult status among fans of Polanski’s work. Polanski would, however, have to wait until the 1990s before reaching new career highs.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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