MUBI

The Tenant is the conclusion to the loosely based “Apartment Trilogy” of films that Roman Polanski directed. Preceded by Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant (while being based on the excellent novel by Roland Topor) follows the themes that are familiar to us through Polanski’s work: paranoia, isolation, repressed sexual desires . . .

Polanski casts himself as Trelkovsky, a Polish man who moves to France and into an apartment complex. A previous tenant throws herself out of her window in an attempt to commit suicide, leaving the room vacant for Trelkovsky to take. He starts noticing his neighbors are acting a little weird, and he constantly sees them across the courtyard through the bathroom window standing motionless. Paranoia kicks in and soon he feels that the tenants are all conspiring to drive him insane. He soon starts dressing like the previous female attendant, and soon the audience is wondering whether Trelkovsky is driven to madness by his own mentality or if the tenants are actually conspiring against him.

The Apartment Trilogy is a set of films that revolve around the expectations of moving into a new apartment. Repulsion focuses around sexual repression while Rosemary’s Baby toys around with isolation and paranoia, making us wonder if she is the only sane one in a mad world. The Tenant toys with all three of these themes, but plays out a little cluttered. Rosemary’s Baby was seamlessly adapted to the screen and faithfully follows the source material, yet Topor’s book is much more dense than Rosemary’s Baby. There is a scene in the film where Trelkovsky takes a woman to a cafe, and he excuses himself to make a phone call. Instead of rushing to the phone he takes a detour into the men’s room to urinate, and then saunters back to the table. I was always confused by this, but the book tells us that he was holding his bladder in for quite sometime and was too embarrassed to say so.

There are always going to be little bits of the book that will be left out of the film, and that doesn’t bother me. I like reading the source material but I always judge the film as a stand alone film, without any biased opinions. It’s hard to replicate the atmosphere of a novel, but Polanski does it quite solidly, yet there is still something missing. Something just didn’t sit right with me, and it’s probably the translation of the book to script. Also, Polanski isn’t the greatest actor in the world. The fact that he is Polish helps bring xenophobia to the screen, but all the nuances of Trelkovsky in the book are lost in Polanski’s interpretation of him. The Tenant is a might fine book, and a solid film, I just wished that Polanski had hired someone else for the title role.