Le Locataire (1976) - film review

Trelkovsky is a shy office clerk who is about to take up residence in an old apartment block in Paris.  When he learns that the previous tenant tried to kill herself by jumping from an upstairs window, he feels compelled to visit her in hospital.  At the bedside of the dying woman he meets Stella, an attractive young woman who claims to be her friend.  Returning to his apartment, Trelkovsky is warned by his landlord not to make any noise during the night.  The tenant does everything he can to oblige but still his neighbours continue to treat him with contempt and hostility.  Then he starts to notice some bizarre things.  He sees the other tenants standing motionless in the toilet room opposite his apartment.  He finds a tooth concealed in a hole in the wall.  And he becomes fascinated by the dead woman’s clothes in the wardrobe.  Trelkovsky is now convinced that his neighbours are determined to kill him by driving him insane, and that Stella is in on the act...

After Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), director Roman Polanski completed his trilogy of films about social isolation and paranoia with The Tenant (a.k.a. Le Locataire) in 1974, an inspired adaptation of a novel by Roland Topor.  In essence, all three films tell the same story - that of a seemingly well-balanced individual, a loner with well-buried psychotic problems, who is driven to insanity as a consequence of a growing suspicion of those around him or her.  Of these three films, Rosemary’s Baby is the most chilling because it muddies the water between psychological breakdown and demonic influences and deals with some terrifying concepts, such as devil worship and Satanic impregnation.   By contrast, The Tenant is a more understated and prosaic work, but it is still deeply unsettling in its depiction of a man who is slowly going out of his mind.   The fact that Polanski himself plays the lead character in this film is revealing - perhaps by portraying a man in mental anguish he sought to confront, if not exorcise, his own personal demons.  As would become apparent when he later made The Pianist, Polanski was indeed a man with a troubled past, someone with good reason for being slightly paranoid and mistrustful of others.

Whilst The Tenant may lack the coherence and sustained visual power of Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, it is nonetheless an intensely compelling film, crafted with Polanski’s usual panache, eccentricity and delicious dark humour.   The first half of the film is virtually faultless.  With the skill of a master storyteller, Polanski draws us into the world of his ill-fated hero and prepares us for the nightmarish intrigue that lies ahead.  Anyone who has rented an apartment will sympathise with Trelkovsky’s situation. Who hasn’t at some point in his life had to put up with unsociable or downright hostile neighbours?  Polanski develops this familiar experience in two ways, interweaving black comedy with psychological thriller.  Before you know it we are in the midst of some kind of mad Kafkaesque fantasy in which the central character has lost the ability to communicate and suspects everyone around him of plotting his destruction.

It is only when we are well into the second half of the film that Polanski starts to lose the plot, presumably along with most of his audience.  When Trelkovsky finally flips the film immediately loses its focus and its credibility.  The problem that Polanski has set himself is practically an impossible one, namely to deliver a subjective impression of insanity (from the point of view of the madman) that is convincing to an audience that is, by and large, compos mentis. The distorted images that Polanski presents us with, flittering chaotically between the real and the surreal, don’t quite cut the mustard, and the end result is more embarrassingly comical than frightening.  Whilst the film does not end as gracefully as other Roman Polasnki films, the experience it offers is overall pretty unsettling, enough to put you off renting for life.

© James Travers 2004-2010

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