FILM CHALLENGE: 130) The Tenant

130) The Tenant

Director: Roman Polanski

Year: 1976

Plot Summary: A quiet and inconspicuous man (Trelkovsky) rents an apartment in France where the previous tenant committed suicide, and begins to suspect his landlord and neighbors are trying to subtly change him into the last tenant so that he too will kill himself.

If anyone knows what it's like to feel like the world is against them it's Roman Polanski. He's a man who was sent to live in a Jewish ghetto after the German invasion of Poland when he was only a young boy, whose mother died in Auschwitz some years later and whose wife was brutally murdered by Charles Manson and his "family." Therefore, The Tenant, the last in his "apartment trilogy" which also consists of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, feels like a very personal movie. He plays the new tenant of an apartment complex in France, Trelkowski, who faces persecution from just about everyone from the concierge and the landlord to the next door neighbour and the owner of the cafe across the street.

In his only role as a lead actor, Polanski's performance is very impressive. However, like with all of his apartment trilogy, it's the entire atmosphere of the film that makes it such an enjoyable watch. Despite the fact that, for the first 90 minutes at least, the movie is made up of very ordinary scenes, there's a constant sense of foreboding and suspense in The Tenant. Therefore, as the main character begins his descent into paranoia, the decaying of his mental state is very believable. The nightmarish imagery that Trelkowski imagines within his troubled mind, furthermore, doesn't feel at all farfetched or out of place neither thanks to the incredible control of atmosphere that Polanski achieves behind the camera.

These delusions are some of the most interesting moments of The Tenant. Scenes in which the fellow tenants applaud him before his suicide attempt or Trelkowski attempts to become a woman are morbid, darkly comic and strangely insightful into the character's psyche. It's obvious while watching The Tenant that Polanski's cult classic was of huge inspiration to film-makers such as Stanley Kubrick or David Lynch in creating their own creepy, haunting pictures like The Shining or Mulholland Drive.

Unfortunately, the film suffers from being a far too long at 2 hours and 10 minutes in length and it fails to have a resolution that is unexpected despite how good it is to watch. Moreover, the fact that it's set entirely in France and yet not a single actor speaks a word of the language is instantly off-putting. Even more so when, in reflection, you realise that there was no need for the story to be set in that country in the first place. While, yes, it may have helped Polanski's movie achieve a wider release in the USA, I'm sure that there are many French citizens who might feel perplexed and possibly even offended by his stylistic choice.

3/5

By Daniel Sarath with No comments