Old Yorker

  • The Tenant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • The Taste of Money

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Do-nui mat

    Sang-soo Im (2012)

    If a Western filmmaker took as their subject a fabulously rich business dynasty, their financial swindles and sexual betrayals, the resulting movie would likely be daring only if it implied approval of the family members’ social or personal morality.  Nor would you expect The Taste of Money – given the economic profile of South Korea – to be regarded there as a shocking exposé of corruption among Seoul’s most successful capitalists:  just as you’d expect, it excoriates their goings-on.  Yet Wikipedia alleges that Sang-soo Im’s movie ‘triggered controversy and hype with its portrayal of the lives of the privileged in Korean society’.  The Taste of Money competed at Cannes last year, where (Wikipedia again) ‘it received the lowest mark out of the 22 works vying for the Palme d’Or according to Screen International’.  Sang-soo Im told the Korean media ‘that his failure to win was a personal “tragedy” and his participation a mistake because he was telling a “very Korean story” that foreigners can’t understand’.  It may be some consolation that his movie (which Im also wrote) has had an international commercial release but I doubt that means non-Korean audiences are taking it seriously.  I enjoyed The Taste of Money in the same kind of way that I enjoyed I Am Love back in 2010.  The opulence of the pathological family’s lifestyle makes it visually appealing.  So does the realisation of what’s pregnant in the morally fetid air of the family life described – ie sex.  But the film is enjoyable only as de luxe trash.

    This is evidently not what Im Sang-soo intended.  Take, for instance, the film’s super-literal opening scene.  Young-jak (Kang-woo Kim), the private secretary to company president Yoon (Yun-shik Baek), is packing cash from the family’s vast bank vault into suitcases, in readiness for a handover that will complete one of the company’s latest transactions.  ‘Take a bit for yourself’, Yoon tells Young-jak, ‘everyone always does’.  The young man picks up a huge wad of notes and sniffs them – he can almost taste the money! – but then decides to replace them.  Sang-soo Im might as well have put an announcement on the screen that this will be a tale of the allure and corruption of wealth, and about how the protagonist Young-jak tries to fight it.  Later on, Young-jak does take a small fortune from the strong room but he eventually replaces that too, and, in doing so, relieves himself of one of the moral burdens that, by now, are weighing heavily on him.    Young-jak, whose own background is far from privileged, has been working for the family for ten years.  As often in this kind of scenario, you soon wonder how his life with them has remained uneventful for as long as it appears to have done.   He’s a chauffeur, a gofer, currently a supplier of prostitutes to keep happy an American businessman (Darcy Paquet) with whom the family is looking to strike a mega-bucks deal.   (For reasons unclear to me, this American is called Robert Altman.)   At one point, Yoon’s divorced daughter Nami (Hyo-jin Kim) tells Young-jak that the first time she saw him she knew she wanted to go to bed with him – a remark that reinforces your awareness of the artificial delay of the two of them getting it together.  They’re both great looking and Nami, alone among the family but in common with Young-jak, is not unscrupulous.  Among the rest of the characters, it’s only the father – although he’s been frequently unfaithful to his wife, the dragon matriarch Geum-ok (Yeo-jeong Yoon) – who has the capacity to love another person, namely the family’s Filipino maid Eva (Maui Taylor), who seems to mean more to Yoon than her predecessors as his mistress.   The discovery of this liaison lights the fuse of Geum-ok’s revenge.  First, she forces Young-jak to have sex with her; then she has Eva killed.   Geum-ok’s bland but baleful son Chul (Ju-wan On) is the other significant member of the family.

    The visual atmosphere of The Taste of Money is rather intriguing:  the tension between the inhuman coldness of the design and decoration of the family’s vast residence and the warmth of lights in darkness, both indoors and outdoors, is strong.   (It seems a long time before there’s a daylight scene at all.)  The sexual encounters are various:  the images of naked flesh can be erotic or coolly geometric – through the position of two bodies in relation to each other – or overripe.  There’s an element of sadism in what Sang-soo Im has happen to Young-jak.  His coupling with a rapacious late middle-aged woman exposes the vulnerability of his suited courtesy and reserve; his getting done over by baddies more than once exposes the vulnerability of his handsome features.   When Yoon, after the death of Eva, cuts his wrists in the bath, the red liquid around him is almost luxurious.   It’s these elements, more than the more explicit critique of the family’s behaviour, that gives The Taste of Money a decadent quality.  There’s a perverted pleasure to be had in the images I’ve mentioned but this isn’t a matter of Sang-soo Im showing you the appeal of the characters’ rottenness while criticising it at the same time.  The images register as the director’s inventions rather than as intrinsic to the way of life being described.

    The finale is rather baffling:  Young-jak, having quit working for the family, flies with Eva’s coffin to the Philippines.   Nami takes the empty seat next to him on the plane and before long they’re having it off in the toilet.  This is amusing enough but in the film’s final scene, in the Philippines, Sang-soo Im takes his camera inside Eva’s coffin and produces a horror moment.  This, because it’s surprising, is immediately effective but it also seems to belong in a different movie.   When Eva’s children learn their mother is dead and her daughter sobs, Young-jak looks up into the sky as if he’s to blame.  Why?  He resisted manfully throughout:  he was hardly seduced into the ethos of the family; he struggled against going to bed with Geum-ok and even took his time having sex with her beautiful daughter.   Although the characters are mostly one-dimensional, the actors are good – especially Kang-woo Kim as Young-jak.  He strikes a fine balance between expressing and controlling his emotions, and it’s not just because nearly everyone else is so malignant that you root for him.

    31 October 2013

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