Roman Polanski’s 1976 film The Tenant, shot in Paris, is considered the final installment in his loosely connected trilogy of urban paranoia films, beginning with the London Repulsion (1965) and the NYC *Rosemary’s Baby * (1968).
Polanski himself plays the title nutcase in The Tenant. There’s a lot of great suspense/terror/madness stuff in this movie, although its the least of the three in narrative quality.
Some of the visuals are terrific, and some are confusing to me. The ball bouncing in the courtyard outside the apartment window, turning into a human head – THAT’S a neat, scary thing. But – the people who appear during the night in the lavatory window across the way…Polanski sometimes watches them through opera glasses, and describes them to co-workers as “standing completely still.” What’s up with them?
First, he sees a dark young woman. Later in the film he sees a middle-aged man. Third, an elderly man with white hair and glasses. All are standing stock still. And not as if they’re actually using the can. They just seem to be standing in the room.
When the lavatory is next shown it is during a fever episode with Polanski’s character; he makes his way through the halls to the toilet, sees that the walls of the room are covered with heiroglyphics (he’s he’s just received a postcard from the Egyptian Wing of the Louvre, addressed to the dead former tenant), and looks across to his own apartment window…where he sees HIMSELF, complete with opera glasses.
Finally, from his own room, he sees the dead former tenant (who had thrown herself from the apartment window), removing her swathed bandages like a striptease artist.
These last two hallucinations make a sort of sense. But WHO ARE THE FIRST THREE PEOPLE? The ones who DON’T MOVE?
Any theories will be cheerfully considered.
Well, hell.
Are my threads lately just too damn boring, overly obscure, or is it my breath?
Or, we could just discuss John Thorne, if nothing else happens here.
Sorry, been too long; only caught it once on the original release and I haven’t a clue who the people not using the can are.
I think part of the problem with responses is simply that The Tenant is rarely seen. It may show up on some indie cable channel or other, but I can’t recall noting any recent television showings at all.
Despite the above, to this day the movie remains one of the few that have ever really made my skin crawl. And that’s despite never being particularly affected by Rosemary’s Baby. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have read the MAD magazine parody before I saw that one, but still.
Well, I watched it just a few weeks ago, and I can’t help you out on who those first three people in the bathroom were. Sorry, man. The middle-aged man unsettled me greatly, though.
Say, maybe Trelkovsky was seeing whom he expected/feared to see (just generic occupants of the bathroom). You know how in the beginning he was complaining to the landlord that he was uneasy about not having his own bathroom, should he ever become sick in the night? Maybe at that stage, he didn’t have a clear or particular image of someone to hallucinate into seeing through the bathroom window, so he created three people at random. If they were created, that is.
Was the entire thing Trelkovsky’s hallucination? Was there ever a Simone Choule?
The whole movie was unsettling. It made me feel similar to the way that “Eraserhead” made me feel (namely, like howling, “What is going on?” much of the time), but it was genuinely suspenseful and shocking (it made me gasp out loud at least a half-dozen times…like when he shoves the armoire against the window and that arm appears behind it) and ultimately pretty good, even with its occasional lapses into incoherence.
He’s got a new book out, you know.
Thank you, Mssrs. Kabong and fodder. I’m pleased that you guys were as boogered by the movie as I was. I never doubted the previous existence of Simone Choule, but – come to think of it – that bandaged body in the early scene could have been Mister Future Trelkovsky.
The eeriest thing about the first three people in the can – as opposed to the mummylike yet animated Choule – was their utter immobility. They were just in there, like corpses…
I saw the movie for the first time only a few weeks ago, and sit down by you Ike, waiting for answers to the OP.
You brought coffee?
I saw the movie in the 80’s. Freaked the hell out of me, but I don’t remember it well enough to discuss it.