The Tenant () is a 1976 French psychological horror thriller film directed by and starring Roman Polanski from a screenplay he co-wrote with Gérard Brach, based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Roland Topor. The film also stars Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova, Claude Dauphin and Shelley Winters. It is the final installment in Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy", following Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1968).
Plot Trelkovsky, a quiet and unassuming man, rents an apartment in Paris whose previous tenant, Egyptologist Simone Choule, attempted suicide by throwing herself out of the window and through a pane of glass below. Before moving in officially, he meets the concierge, who shows him the apartment and the spot where Simone fell. Nobody knows the reason for the suicide attempt. Trelkovsky visits Simone in the hospital but finds her entirely in bandages and unable to talk. While still at Simone's bedside, Trelkovsky meets her friend, Stella, who has also come to visit. Stella is overwhelmed with emotion and begins talking to Simone, who looks towards her visitors and screams monstrously. The matron insists they leave, having already informed Trelkovsky that he may not speak to Simone. Trelkovsky tries to comfort Stella but dares not say that he never knew Simone, instead pretending to be another friend. They leave together and go out for a drink and a movie, where they fondle each other. Outside the theatre, they part ways. Later, Trelkovsky calls up the hospital to enquire about Simone and is told she has died.
As Trelkovsky occupies the apartment, he is chastised repeatedly by his neighbors and landlord, Monsieur Zy, for hosting a party with his friends, apparently having a woman over, making too much noise in general and not joining in on a petition against another neighbor. Trelkovsky attempts to adapt to his situation but is increasingly disturbed by the apartment and the other tenants. He frequently sees his neighbors standing motionless in the toilet room (which he can see from his own window) and discovers a hole in the wall with a human tooth stashed inside. He discusses this with his friends, who do not find things strange and belittle him for not standing up to his neighbours. He visits the apartment of one of his work friends, who plays a marching band record at a spitefully loud volume. A neighbour politely asks him to turn down the music, as his wife is ill and trying to sleep. Trelkovsky turns the record down, but his friend tells the neighbour that he will play his music as he wants, and that he does not care about his sick wife.
Trelkovsky receives a visit from one Georges Badar, who secretly loved Simone and has believed her to be alive and well. Trelkovsky updates and comforts the man and spends the night out with him. He receives a postcard that Badar had posted before realising Simone had died. Frequenting the nearby café which Simone also patronised, he is recognized as the new tenant of her apartment. The owner pressures him into having Simone's regular order, which is then always given to him without being ordered, against his preferences. They are always out of his preferred choice of cigarette, Gauloises, so he develops a habit of ordering Marlboros, which Simone used to order.
Trelkovsky becomes severely agitated and enraged when his apartment is robbed, while his neighbors and the concierge continue to berate him for making too much noise; Zy warns him not to inform the police of the burglary. Suffering from fever and bad dreams, Trelkovsky wakes up one morning to find his face made up. He buys a wig and women's shoes and goes on to dress up (using Simone's dress, which he had found in a cupboard) and the viewer realizes that no one is standing still in the opposite bathroom in front of his window. The next morning, he realizes that one of his front teeth is missing and finds it in another hole in his apartment. He suspects that Zy and the neighbors are trying to subtly change him into the last tenant, Simone, so that he too will kill himself. He becomes hostile in his day-to-day environment, and his mental state progressively deteriorates. He has visions of his neighbors playing football with a human head; finding the toilet covered in hieroglyphs; and looking across the courtyard, seeing himself standing at his apartment window, looking into the bathroom with binoculars. He runs off to Stella for comfort and sleeps over, but in the morning after she has left for work, he concludes that she too is in on his neighbors' plot and proceeds to vandalise and burgle her apartment before departing.
At night, Trelkovsky is hit by an elderly couple driving a car, but he is not seriously injured. The responding doctor, who believes Trelkovsky's odd behavior is caused by delirium tremens, gives him a sedative injection. Trelkovsky perceives the elderly couple as Zy and wife, accusing them of trying to murder him. The couple returns him to his apartment. A deranged Trelkovsky dresses up again as a woman and throws himself out of the window in the manner of Simone, before what he believes to be a clapping, cheering audience composed of his neighbors. The suicide attempt wakes up his neighbors, who call the police and attempt to restrain him. He crawls away from them back to his apartment and jumps out the window a second time moments after the police arrive.
In the final scene, Trelkovsky is bandaged up in the same fashion as Simone, in the same hospital bed. From his perspective, his and Stella's visit to Simone is shown. Trelkovsky then lets out a monstrous scream as Simone did in the earlier scene.
Cast
Themes and interpretations Overview In his review of the film for The Regrettable Moment of Sincerity, Adam Lippe writes: "Many would attest that The Pianist is Polanski's most personal work, given the obvious Holocaust subject matter, but look beneath the surface, and when the window curtains are drawn aside, Polanski's The Tenant shines brightest as the work closest to his being."Lippe, Adam. The Tenant , The Regrettable Moment of Sincerity, 21 January 2009
Like the other two films in Polanski's Apartment Trilogy, The Tenant blurs the line between psychological thriller and horror. It garnered critical comparisons to both its contemporaries Don't Look Now (1973) by Nicolas RoegCastle, Robert (2004). Disturbing Movies: or the Flip Side of the Real , Bright Lights Film Journal, 30 April 2004 and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).Del Valle, David (2010). Wig of a Poet: Un Polanski Rorschach , ACIDEMIC: Journal of Film and Media, 2010 Given its production design, photography, and the bizarre scenario of a group of neighbors that appear to be preying on a new tenant's life and conspiring against him for that purpose, it has also been compared to the black comedy film Delicatessen (1991). The narrative seems to suggest a house as the malevolent source to the sinister deeds of its inhabitants, and is set in a post-apocalyptic future where all animals have died and the people of a remote decaying house resort to eating each of the house's successive new janitors.Hanke, Ken (2006). Delicatessen , Mountain Xpress, 26 March 2008Taunton, Matthew. "Delicatessen, The Tenant and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange", chapter in Taunton's book Fictions Of The City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 37-48
While the main character is clearly paranoid to some extent, the 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".
Kafka influence Many critics have noted The Tenants strong Kafkaesque theme, typified by an atmosphere that is absurdly over-burdened with anxiety, confusion, guilt, bleak humour, alienation, sexual frustration and paranoia. However, the film cannot be viewed as purely driven by a Kafkaesque motif because of the numerous references to Trelkovsky's delirium and heavy drinking. This allows for more than one interpretation.
Most of the action occurs within a claustrophobic environment where dark, ominous things occur without reason or explanation to a seemingly shy protagonist, whose perceived failings as a tenant are ruthlessly pursued by what Trelkovsky himself views as an increasingly cabalistic conspiracy. Minor infringements are treated as serious breaches of his tenancy agreement, and this apparent persecution escalates after he refuses to join his neighbours in a prejudiced campaign to oust a mother with a disabled child.
"The scheming plots over matters of extraordinary pettiness and inexplicable conspiracies that go on among the neighbours to gang up on others make The Tenant probably the first Kafkaesque horror film."Scheib, Richard. THE TENANT (Le Locataire) , Moira: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review
"Much effect is derived from the absurdity of the scenario where all Trelkovsky wants to do is not bother anyone, yet everything Trelkovsky does is seen as an imposition."Lorefice, Mike (2003). Le Locataire (The Tenant, France/USA - 1976) , Raging Bull Movie Reviews, 8 December 2003
Critics have speculated that the film's Kafkaesque atmosphere must be in part a reflection of Polanski's own Jewish experiences within a predominantly anti-Semitic environment. Trelkovsky is viewed with suspicion by almost every other character simply because he has a foreign name. For example, when he tries to report a robbery to the French police he is treated sceptically and told that as a foreigner he should not make trouble. Both the director and the protagonist are outsiders who strive ineffectually for acceptance in what they see as a corrupt and mysterious world.
Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times: "Trelkovsky exists. He inhabits his own body, but it's as if he had no lease on it, as if at any moment he could be dispossessed for having listened to the radio in his head after 10 P.M. People are always knocking on his walls."
According to Ulrich Behrens of Der Mieter (translated from the German):
Doomed cycle, loss of self, and social assimilation The Tenant has been referred to as a precursor to Kubrick's The Shining (1980), as another film where the lines between reality, madness, and the supernatural become increasingly blurry (the question usually asked with The Shining is "Ghosts or cabin fever?") as the protagonist finds himself doomed to cyclically repeat another person's nightmarish fall. Just like in The Shining, the audience is slowly brought to accept the supernatural by what at first seems a slow descent into madness, or vice versa: "The audience's predilection to accept a proto-supernatural explanation [...] becomes so pronounced that at Trelkovsky's break with sanity the viewer is encouraged to take a straightforward hallucination for a supernatural act."Smuts, Aarons (2002). Sympathetic spectators: Roman Polanski's Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976) , Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film, Vol. 2, Issue 3, 4 February 2002
In his book Polanski and Perception, Davide Caputo has called the fact that in the end, Trelkovsky defenestrates himself not once, but twice, "a cruel reminder of the film's 'infinite loop'"Caputo, Davide (2012). Polanski and Perception: The Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski , Intellect Books, 2012, , p. 159 of Trelkovsky becoming Simone Choule and meeting Trelkovsky shortly before dying in the hospital, a loop not unlike The Shining'''s explanation that Jack Torrance "has always been the Overlook's caretaker". Timothy Brayton of Antagony & Ecstasy likens this eternally looping cycle of The Tenant to the film's recurring Egyptian motifs: