The Tenant
Le locataire
Roman Polanski (1976)
Polanski had already illustrated in Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby the risks to one’s sanity of living in an apartment. This third variation on the theme (based on a 1964 novel by Roland Topor called Le locataire chimérique, adapted by the director and Gérard Brach) is, from the start, freighted with inevitability and anxiety. When Trelkovsky (Polanksi) first arrives at the Paris apartment block to rent rooms, he’s vague about how he was put onto the place but you sense it’s his destiny. The concierge’s yappy dog immediately bites him. As she shows Trelkovsky the top floor apartment, the concierge explains the unhappy end to its previous tenancy: Simone Choule, the young woman who rented the place, jumped out of the window, crashed through a glass roof below, and now lies in hospital with no hope of recovery. Your natural expectation is that fateful history will repeat itself. Even without these forebodings, the film’s title serves as a reminder that all of us are in possession of the place that houses us only temporarily; it soon becomes clear that a main theme of The Tenant is the vulnerability of personal identity.
For no better reason than that it’s essential to the plot, Trelkovsky visits Simone Choule in hospital, where he literally bumps into Simone’s friend Stella. Simone, who was an Egyptologist, has the appearance of a mummy. Swathed in bandages, she’s reduced to eyes and a mouth which, although it’s unable to speak, lets out a horrifying cry before she dies. Trelkovksy’s visit seems to finish her off. Later, in a rare moment of relative relaxation, lying in bed with Stella, an inebriated Trelkovsky refects on losing different parts of his body but remaining himself. (These musings culminate in ‘… if they cut off my head, what could I say then? Myself and my body, or myself and my head? By what right does the head, which isn’t even a member like an arm or a leg, claim the title of “myself”?’) These two strands of the material – history repeating itself and the loss of selfhood – converge: Trelkovksy becomes, or falls prey to a paranoid delusion that he’s becoming, Simone Choule.
Some elements of this process are disturbing because they’re presented in a matter-of-fact or understated way. The patron and the garçon in the café-bar where Trelkovksy goes each morning offer him hot chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes because these are what Simone liked. There’s an implication that Stella and Simone had a lesbian relationship, and that this is why Stella goes to bed with Trelkovksy. Other aspects of his new identity are more garishly superficial: Trelkovsky eventually buys a woman’s wig and, with Simone’s clothes and cosmetics still in the apartment, dresses and makes himself up as her. The protagonist’s existential horror is also developed through a mixture of the insidious and the melodramatic. Trelkovksy, who looks to have an anonymous office job, has friends from work round for a flat-warming. They make a racket; from this point onwards, the determinedly inoffensive tenant is repeatedly accused by his landlord of disturbing the peace of the block late at night. When Trelkovksy attends Simone’s funeral service in a church, the priest turns from conventional sentiments to vindictive invective (both are very badly read by the dubbed-into-English voice on the soundtrack) about the corpse-eating worms that the deceased richly deserves. Trelkovksy listens in sweaty terror, knowing that the priest is really referring to him. You know that Simone’s terrible dying scream sound will be reprised through the dark void of Trelkovksky’s gaping mouth at the end of the film and so it is – although the effect is still undeniably powerful and frightening. Yet Polanski lays on the ominousness so indiscriminately that he sometimes dilutes its effect. Trelkovksy’s work colleagues are photographed in close-up to emphasise their big, going-on-grotesque faces. Since there’s no indication that he feels threatened by them, their minatory quality seems merely imposed.
Yet The Tenant is absorbing and Polanski is the reason why. Apart from his momentary appearance in Repulsion and his cameo in Chinatown, I don’t recall seeing him act before. As Trelkovksy, he’s nothing special when he’s seriously emoting but the quieter parts of his characterisation are impressive. One of the strongest sequences in the film occurs when Trelkovsky shows sympathy towards a man who secretly loved Simone Choule. (Polanksi and Rufus, as the other man, play this episode beautifully – and it has a retrospective power in the sense that, if Trelkovksy is Simone, then the kindness he shows to her admirer is a fulfilment of the latter’s hopes.) The integrity of Polanski’s acting makes Trelkovksy’s manifold hallucinations more upsetting because you believe in the person that’s experiencing them. I felt this tenant’s fate consuming him more powerfully than I felt the walls of her London flat closing in on Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.
There are too elements of Polanski’s biography that I couldn’t help feeling increased the impact of the story and his presence in the film: his concentration camp experiences; his sense of being regarded with suspicion as a Pole in France; the psychological residue of Sharon Tate’s murder. Although the dubbing is awful (especially with four or five voices at once), after a while it actually adds to Trelkovksy’s sense of alienation and imprisonment, and the post-recorded sound of American voices speaking the words of the French actors in The Tenant seems weirdly to anticipate Polanski’s asylum in Europe that began a year after this movie was made. Some of the actors do speak in their own, distinctive voices: Polanski himself, Melvyn Douglas (as the landlord), Shelley Winters (the concierge), Jo Van Fleet (the most viciously persecutive resident of the block of flats), and Lila Kedrova (the woman on the receiving end of the persecution). These first-rate actors, Kedrova especially, bring considerable force to their characters, although Van Fleet is very stagy. I’m not sure if Isabelle Adjani, as Stella, spoke her own lines in English but their reading wrecks her performance. The dark-toned but rich cinematography is by Sven Nykvist. Philippe Sarde’s excellent score is mysterious and melancholy.
23 January 2013