Part of Hoop-Tober

“What if she gets better?” “Don’t worry, she won’t get better.”

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum. If my cat’s reaction to my Dyson is any indication, this axiom is unimpeachably true. The maxim is usually attributed to Aristotle (in the appealingly macabre form of “horror vacui”), who believed that any theoretical void would be filled by surrounding material, instantly wiping it out. Nothing—the absence of something—cannot really exist, for something will always take nothing’s place.

This ancient principle underlies Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, the third and final entry in his so-called “Apartment Trilogy” (after Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby). Each of the trilogy's films brilliantly explores the disadvantages and incipient paranoia of close-quarters city dwelling (paranoia…

Roman Polanski's The Tenant builds a myriad of psychological layers around the director cast in the central role of Trelkovsky. It is a film often grouped together with Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion under the 'apartment trilogy' banner although this film develops into far more mysterious and complicated film than the other two.

His decision to cast himself as the films protagonist is an odd one given his lack of prominence infront of the lens previously. Only twelve months later he would face a life defining moment with accusations of rape reshaping his artistic approach. As such it is suggested that The Tenant is heavily autobiographical.

Polanski makes it crystal clear that this timid newcomer to the building is struggling to…

An intricately plotted & skilfully layered study of urban paranoia & mental disintegration, the third & final entry in Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy is a highly ambiguous & utterly mystifying psychological thriller that utilises all the elements prevalent in the previous entries of this unofficial trilogy but may also polarise its viewers due to its drowsy pace & lack of transparency.

The Tenant (also known as Le Locataire) tells the story of a quiet, timid & inconspicuous man who moves into a Parisian apartment after its previous occupant commits suicide but soon finds himself being unreasonably reprimanded by his landlord & neighbours and begins suspecting that they are all plotting a scheme to transform him into the last tenant so that he too will follow her fate.…

so here's a strange story.

i watched this today assuming that i had never before seen "the tenant", but i wanted to finish polanski's "apartment trilogy," especially because i love "repulsion" and "rosemary's baby."

at first i found "the tenant" unfamiliar - and to be honest, kind of dull - but then it began getting weirder...more uncanny.

which is to say, more familiar in its unfamiliarity.

something (may have?) clicked.

when polanski reveals the tenant, trelkovsky, to be a cross-dresser (posing as a former tenant), i realized that this is a film that may've haunted me for years.

i saw a similar movie on t.v., probably when i was about 12 or 13, and i have never forgotten its manic…

100 Films by 18 Directors: Roman Polanski

The third entry into director Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy, The Tenant further explores paranoia alongside Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Dripping with paranoia from the very beginning, the film stars Polanski as Monsieur Trelkovsky, a man who moves into the apartment of a woman who just killed herself. After becoming obsessed with her, he visits her in the hospital (before she finally died) and slowly begins to take over her life. Ordering the same drink at a restaurant, smoking the same cigarettes, hanging out with her old friends, wearing make-up, and dressing like a woman, he slowly becomes Simone. Even worse, he has visions of the fellow tenants trying to kill him and nightmares…

It is a social and personal metamorphosis, the whole story exudes an air of nonsense and harsh criticism. It includes a descent into structured madness and cruelly posed. It is an allegory of what is and what one represents, is the representation of the "I", expressed by the proclamation of this does not exist as such, which has been the reification of society and the emphasis on "what I see of you and what I perceive of you "what really describes what the "I" comes to mean. It is a mirror of an expelling and shaping society, a malignant tumult of beings that only want to have fun at the expense of what they want to project in you; on…

"If you cut off my head, what would I say... Me and my head, or me and my body? What right has my head to call itself me?"

For much of its runtime, I wasn't entirely sure which direction The Tenant was headed, and I wasn't entirely sure if it was working as a whole. The first act was delightfully uncanny in a way that Polanski is so good at capturing -- but the middle passages felt a bit too scattered in a way that Polanski's work usually isn't. Then the ending happened... and while it didn't completely redeem what came before, it certainly helped put everything into context. It sufficiently unnerved even me, and that's rare these days. It's…