Le Locataire / The Tenant - by Roman Polanski (1976)

In Paris, the shy bureaucrat Trelkovsky rents an old apartment without bathroom where the previous tenant, the Egyptologist Simone Choule, committed suicide. The unfriendly concierge (Shelley Winters) and the tough landlord Mr. Zy establish stringent rules of behavior and Trekovsky feels ridden by his neighbors. Meanwhile he visits Simone in the hospital and befriends her girlfriend Stella. After the death of Simone, Trekovsky feels obsessed for her and believes his landlord and neighbors are plotting a scheme to force him to also commit suicide.

"I think I'm pregnant," Roman Polanski coos beguilingly to the mirror in his 1976 film, The Tenant. He's clearly thrilled with his appearance; he's done himself up in a black floral print dress, with a blonde wig, blue eye shadow, nude stockings, strappy black pumps, and pretty red nail polish, haltingly applied. Like Dustin Hoffman, he has a little bit of nose, so that he resembles that actor's drag in Tootsie, but without the glasses. It's not so bad. He preens a while, and shows some leg by lifting one foot onto a chair.

Seeing him all dressed up like this, you can't help but wonder about the occasion. Playing Trelkovsky, a Polish immigrant living in Paris, Polanski imagines he's the target of a plot to drive him insane and thus secure his suicide. The plotters, his neighbors in the building, have a specific method in mind: they want him to throw himself out the window, like the previous tenant of his apartment, a young Egyptologist named Mme. Schulz. Indeed, they are trying to make Trelkovsky become Mme. Schulz. And so it is that he's wearing his wig and makeup.

The Tenant wasn't exactly beloved by critics on its initial release. "It does not seem to be designed as self-parody," wrote Newsweek's Janet Maslin, "but it certainly comes across that way." Leslie Halliwell, in his Film Guide, complained that it showed "the total dissipation of whatever talent [Polanski] once had." I can vouch for only one favorable review, that of Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker – and even that was cautiously worded, like an act of charity for a man who had led a notoriously difficult life. The film received a video release, but it's long since dropped off the shelves so that, like Cul-de-Sac (1966), it became very difficult to see.

Production land: france
Run time: ~ 125 min

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Mystery DVD-Rip Drama HDTV 1970 Art-house Thriller

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