Roman Polanski’s twisted ‘apartment horror’ creepshow melds supernatural and psychological possession — a meek clerk finds himself being possessed by the previous occupant of his apartment: a woman who committed suicide. It might be all in his mind, but the spook-show trimmings are compelling too: the new tenant plays his cross-dressing new role to the bitter end. Polanski’s razor-sharp direction piles on the unpleasantness and paranoia, abetted by Sven Nykvist’s cinematography and a battery of stellar performances by Melvyn Douglas, Shelly Winters, Isabelle Adjani, Jo Van Fleet and Lila Kedrova.

The Tenant 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Vinegar Syndrome
1976 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 125 min. / Street Date Novembar 26, 2024 / Available from Vinegar Syndrome / 64.98
Starring: Roman Polanski, Melvyn Douglas, Shelly Winters, Isabelle Adjani, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova.
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production Designer: Pierre Guffroy
Art Directors: Claude Moesching, Albert Rajau
Costume Design: Jacques Schmidt
Film Editor: Françoise Bonnot
Original Music: Philippe Sarde
Screenplay by Gérard Brach, Roman Polanski from the novel Le Locataire chimérique by Roland Topor
Produced by Andrew Braunsberg
Directed by Roman Polanski

When The Tenant arrived in 1976 we were primed and ready for another Roman Polanski horror masterpiece. It seemed logical that the director of  Chinatown would have near-unlimited choices for his next film, so we were surprised when he doubled back to the horror genre. Patrick Dahl writes that The Tenant was already in development at Paramount, and that Polanski took it because he couldn’t get his personal Pirates project going. He reportedly ‘wasn’t very involved with it.”  Not that one can tell — the final product reflects the director’s full attention to every detail.

At that time we regarded Polanski as a superior director who never took a wrong step. His  Repulsion and  Rosemary’s Baby are smart commercial productions, well fashioned as to move the Polish director to the top rank of cinema talent. We even liked his odd feature  What? — we could tell that it was exactly what Polanski wanted it to be. The Tenant is another quirky item that exercises the director’s absurdist, personal side. Without big star names, its commercial prospects relied wholly on the director’s reputation. Author Roland Topor’s source novel describes a psychological haunting that makes little rational sense; co-writers Polanski and Gérard Brach twist it into an equally mysterious puzzle built around Polanski’s personal themes and manias.

The Tenant is never dull, and it is directed with the precision we expect from the director. In terms of filmmaking craftsmanship it cannot be faulted. But it is also not as involving as it might be. Too much of what happens feels too familar, as if Polanski is going over themes he had covered before, with more clarity of purpose.

The Paris of The Tenant is a Kafka-lite psycho-scape within the mind of Trelkovsky, a quiet, uncharismatic clerk (Roman Polanski). Just to be shown a rather shabby apartment, he endures a rude concierge (Shelley Winters) and accepts the browbeating of the landlord Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas). The flat’s previous tenant Simone Choule (Dominique Poulange) is dying in hospital; she threw herself out of her window. Trelkovsky meets one of Simone’s friends, the sexually aggressive Stella (Isabelle Adjani). The rest of his relationships are a Kafkaesque nightmare. His boorish co-workers purposely make trouble for him. For no fault of his own, his neighbors all have reasons to hate him. The pathetic Madame Gaderian (Lila Kedrova) pleads that she’s being persecuted. The waspish Madame Dioz (Jo Van Fleet) becomes furious when Trelkovsky won’t sign her malicious petition.

Trelkovsky proves incapable of dealing with this casual oppression. His behaviors become erratic, and he begins to experience waking hallucinations. He imagines that his neighbors are persecuting him, and even trying to kill him. We sometimes see more than one ‘version’ of reality, hinting that Trelkovsky’s interior perceptions have become warped. The psychosis is tangled with his guilty ‘relationship’ with the dead Simone Choule, which frays his hold on his own identity. He fixates on Mlle. Choule — her dress that was left behind, the kind of cigarettes she smoked. He eventually buys a wig, and dresses in her clothing. Is it supernatural possession, or a twisted effort to atone for some undefined offense?

By the mid-’70s audiences were open to high-grade horror that was more than a series of shocks, despite the knee-jerk literal approach of the blockbuster  The Exoricist. Nicolas Roeg’s  Don’t Look Now is a good example. The Tenant concentrates on Trelkovsky’s discomfort: a series of uneasy, unpleasant experiences. His daily regimen of personal abuse has the negative bias we expect from Polanski. The horror crowd liked the fixation on unsettling weirdness, but the film held less appeal for general audiences. Not everybody is going to like spending 2-plus hours with Trelkovsky,  a melancholy depressive who doesn’t stick up for himself. He’s the kind of social victim that eventually gets told, “You know these problems are all your own fault.”

The movie plays as if made from squeamish ideas from Polanski’s own personality. His recurring motif of ‘The Wardrobe’ is here, an unwieldy piece of furniture that was the star of one of his widely-shown Polish student films. Some of Trelkovsky’s hallucinations are deceptively subtle. The visions of various people standing in a window across from his balcony have an unnerving quality … we can’t quite see them clearly.  (Top image ↑ )  Are they looking at us?   They at first look like painted artwork — and then they move.  ^*  Trelkovsky finds a tooth in a hole in a plaster wall … the very texture of the wall doesn’t seem right. An ‘Egyptian’ theme culminates in another wall that is suddenly covered with heiroglyphics. We first know that Trelkovsky is cracking up when his guilt feelings cause a priest’s sermon to become a personal attack. But when he imagines that a neighbor is choking him, and reacts by choking himself, the scene seems forced.

A lot of unanswered questions arise. How much of what we see is tainted by Trelkovsky’s distorted perceptions?  Has he fallen into a cruel circle of Hell, where everybody is sexually maladjusted?  A tearful friend of the dead tenant goes overboard with remorse, pouring out his grief to Trelkovsky. Do the concierge and Madame Dioz channel their frustration into hostile attitudes?  Does co-worker Scope (Bernard Fresson) bully people to mask a sexual inadequacy?  The sexually assertive Stella appears to be separate from those demons in that she doesn’t attack Trelkovsy. But are we to think that he dodges her advances because he’s already possessed by Simone Choule?

The big break with average audiences comes when Trelkovsky flips out and begins cross-dressing to ‘become’ Simone Choule. The psychological hints are all there but the transition feels too abrupt anyway. Our reaction is that Trelkovsky must have been cracking up even before he took the apartment. Some scenes are genuinely mysterious. What do we make of the scene in which Stella becomes aroused while watching a matinee of the violent  Enter the Dragon?  Why does Polanski emphasize shots of Bruce Lee’s grimacing Kung-fu face?  We really don’t want to hear a postgraduate analysis of the erotic charge delivered by Bruce Lee Kung-Fu.

As is typical with a Polanski film, we will watch just to marvel at his precise use of the camera — every move feels perfect. At one point in the apartment he switches to an extreme wide-angle lens, reminding us of a similar effect in Repulsion, accomplished with a distorted set. The Tenant  marked the first use of the French-built Louma Crane, a device that mounted a remote-controlled camera on the end of a manually-manipulated boom arm. This was back when reflex video taps on movie cameras were just being introduced. It was used for the fluid opening shot that drifts from window to window in Trelkovsky’s apartment building. At one point it pauses at Trelkovsky’s window to observe the suicidal Simone dissolving into her successor.

One cannot help but admire Polanski’s mastery of the stellar group of actors in his ensemble. Jo Van Fleet and Shelley Winters make vivid impressions, and old Melvyn Douglas is perfect as the always-disapproving landlord. Bernard Fresson leads the group of Trelkovsky’s annoyingly crude friends. Lila Kedrova is the ‘eternally persecuted’ tenant, always weeping, accusing her accusers. Isabelle Adjani’s Stella may be the only person who treats Trelkovsky fairly.

Roman Polanski’s acting is undeniably excellent. Like Kafka’s “K,” Trelkovsky is neither endearing nor charismatic. His visit to Simone in the hospital may not be ghoulish, but it is selfish, and he prevaricates when introducing himself to Stella. He does a good job explaining his ‘self-alienation,’ not knowing who he is or what part of his body is ‘him’ and what is not. Trelkovsky’s acts of kindness — to Stella, to the confused man who wishes he had been Simone’s boyfriend — are superficial at best. When under pressure he is just as terrible as (he imagines?) people are toward him. He berates the inoffensive cafe waiter, and slaps a little kid in the park.

The final act plunges deep into Guignol territory, hitting a streak of giddy absurdist overstatement. It made the attentive audience I saw crack up in awkward disbelief. The spectacle of Trelkovsky dragging his broken body along the floor is truly grotesque. Reading accounts of real psychotic delirium suggests that the director knows what he’s doing — Trelkovsky is a psychotic whose violence is self-directed. Because Roman Polanski plays the main role, it’s too easy for viewers to think that he personally identifes with the deranged Trelkovsky.

We think that The Tenant simply concentrates on Polanski’s interest in artistic absurdism. The style dominates his work in film school. His brilliant  Cul-De-Sac and  The Fearless Vampire Killers are both absurd comedies. We haven’t seen  Pirates in 30 years, and suspect that it might be his most elaborate theater-of-the-absurd joke. Commentators and critics align The Tenant with his two earlier ‘apartment’ movies with Catherine Deneuve and Mia Farrow. We connect it to Polanski’s later post-exile European pictures, especially  Frantic, which is also set in Paris, and has several similar scenes. Harrison Ford’s panicked doctor struggles to rescue his kidnapped wife, an ordeal that at first makes him feel like the victim of absurd, irrational events.

If any film director can claim to be disturbed and haunted by absurd, irrational events, Roman Polanski qualifies.

Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Tenant is a precise encoding that captures the nuances of Sven Nyqvist’s cinematography. It is said to be newly scanned and restored in 4K from the 35mm original camera negative. Seen in 4K detail, Nyqvist’s slightly contrasty images bring out the red in Roman Polanski’s skin. Paris looks a bit chilly — Trelkovsky’s lips look ruddy red even before he starts wearing lipstick. Philippe Sarde’s delicate score comes across clearly. Trelkovsky’s apartment is bombarded by odd plumbing noises and unidentifiable creaks and bumps — we’re ready for walls to crack, as in Repulsion.

It really is a toss-up as to which language track best fits the movie. The American stars are better with their own voices, but the overall credibility is best served by the French track. The dubbing is so good, we barely notice that lips don’t always match.

Most of the extras have been seen before but all are good. Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson are an A-team pair of commentators with a thoughtful take on ‘what it all means;’ the new essays in VS’s booklet go even further with their interpretations. The inevitable essay examining The Tenant through a Trans filter is intelligent and well-considered.

We always gravitate to interviews with Roman Polanski, whose knowledge and understanding of everything cinematic knows no limits. I was once in a room with Polanski and Douglas Trumbull for a discussion of film formats, including 3-D. Polanski’s opinion on the limitations of stereoscopic movies was fascinating, clear and well-reasoned.

Lastly, we’re also entertained by Video Syndrome’s novelty packaging. The Blu-ray box opens up like a bay window, to access the keep case inside. It is surprisingly sturdy — those moving panels feel like they will last. The near-standard sized box doesn’t require a special shelf, either.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Tenant 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent English + French language tracks
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson
Video interviews:
Paranoid in Paris (22 min) with Roman Polanski
Waiting for The Tenant (16 min) with actor André Penvern
Room to Let (22 min) with critic Stephen Thrower
The Invisible Performer (15 min) – with assistant cameraman François Catonné
Keeping Continuity (5 min) – with script supervisor Sylvette Baudrot
Featurette A Visit to the Locations (11 min)
Audio Interviews:
with author Roland Topor (6 min)
with co-writer Gérard Brach (5 min)
Reversible sleeve artwork
40-page illustrated booklet with essays by Patrick Dahl, Veronica Fitzpatrick, and Willow Catelyn Maclay.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc + Blu-ray in Keep case in a card sleeve with a booklet all inside a novelty ‘French Windows’ display box
Reviewed: October 23, 2024
(7216tena)

^*  Those staring, still figures we can barely see — a couple of them look like photo cut-outs, reminding us of the curiously distancing literal photo cut-outs in Federico Fellini’s  Toby Dammit. They also have something in common with the ‘green ghoul’ that takes the place of the MGM Lion logo in Polanski’s  Dance of the Vampires. The staring ghoul isn’t scary, and neither is he particularly funny — he’s just unsettling.  Polanski keeps The Tenant’s ‘window phantoms’ at a distance. On a small television, they really won’t register.

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