Format: DVD from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.
Yesterday, a great deal of what I wrote about was the problem of effusive praise for someone who may be morally repellent. In that review, I referenced something I wrote years ago about Chinatown. We’re heading into the same territory here, since The Tenant is Roman Polanski’s third film in his loose “Apartment Trilogy,” following Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. .In some ways, as is the case with many trilogies, the third film is the weakest. This is not a Godfather III situation, though. In a lot of ways, The Tenant (Le Locataire) is as good as anything Polanski ever did.
In a lot of ways The Tenant explores the same themes as Repulsion, only this time from a male perspective. A man named Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski himself) needs an apartment in Paris and discovers one that is suddenly empty. He more or less bargains his way into the apartment with Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas) and takes up residence despite what seems to be a certain level of hostility from the people around him, particularly the concierge (Shelley Winters). Trelkovsky also learns that the former resident of the apartment, an Egyptologist named Simone Choule has left the apartment vacant because of an attempted suicide. She threw herself out of the window and through a glass awning several stories below.
