THE TENANT Movie Review

Le Locataire

Roman Polanski's supremely creepy The Tenant is a Kafkaesque story about a meek, hapless office worker (Polanski) who moves into a big, decaying, spooky Parisian apartment building (How spooky? The concierge is Shelley Winters, that's how spooky.) Once ensconced in his new digs, Polanski spends much of his time obsessing on the previous tenant, who committed suicide by defenestrating herself. The discovery of her clothes prompts Polanski to dress in them, but when the neighbor below him tells him to make less noise, Polanski sits down without moving, terrified of being chastised, and of wrinkling his (her) dress. He spends so much time imagining how his neighbors would like to force him to jump out of that same window that he has no time for his sexually aggressive co-worker (Isabelle Adjani).Though it suffers a bit from the disembodied, post-synchronized English-language soundtrack, The Tenant may be Polanski's most unjustly neglected film. This portrait of a quick and inevitable descent into madness is bitterly funny and outrageous—you get the feeling that Polanski was trying out ideas that he had had for a long time, but didn't know where to use them. An example is the priceless scene in a bar in which a cowering man proclaims that everyone's against him; Polanski's character tries to comfort the man and assure him that he's being silly—not everyone could be against him. Suddenly a stranger bellows “drinks for everyone!,” after which he slowly approaches the cowering man, points directly at him and says “Except him.” With The Tenant, Polanski has created the Lawrence of Arabia of paranoia.

NEXT STOP … Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Dead of Night

1976 (R) 126m/C FR Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Shelley Winters; D: Roman Polanski; W: Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski; C: Sven Nykvist VHS NO