The Tenant (1976)
Directed by Roman Polanski
A quiet and inconspicuous man rents an apartment in Paris where he finds himself drawn into a rabbit hole of dangerous paranoia.
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Co-written by Polanski and Gerard Brach, "Repulsion" follows an escalating dove-tailing story form that Polanski explored in his later "apartment" films "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant."
This was, in fact, something Polanski would return to—with himself in the title role—in The Tenant (1976).
Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, and The Tenant are often loosely linked as Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy", scary films about the life of urban renters.
It's certainly tempting to look at Repulsion as an answer to Psycho (released five years before) and as a warm-up for Polanski's The Tenant and Rosemary's Baby, with their hemmed-in apartments and batty old neighbors (and limber, free-form camera work).
The neighbours in The Tenant share their blood lust.
Though the story of an immigrant (Polanski) being driven insane as he gradually transforms into the previous tenant of his overpriced Parisian apartment has a certain affinity to Polanski’s earlier film Repulsion (1965), the core of The Tenant is about the casual persecution of a foreigner in a strange land for no other reason than the fact that he is a foreigner.
Redeeming the carte blanche ticket he earned for Chinatown 's success, Polanski made The Tenant, a masterpiece of anguish that harks back to his earlier mindfucks Cul-de-Sac and Repulsion (in fact, The Tenant is all but a mirror image of Repulsion) while being more substantial than either of them.
Roman Polanski definitely has a Rear Window fetish, but this is not to say that he's big on voyeurism.
The film doesn't say that urban living is too much to bear (as do some '70s films, like Little Murders or Taxi Driver), and it's not a treatise on the necessity of family or social immersion.
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Like " Last Tango in Paris ," it involves the apartment shortage in Paris.
Indeed, in “Knife in the Water” (1962) you can see elements and themes that Polanski extrapolated on in psychological thrillers such as “Repulsion” (1965), “Cul-de-sac” (1966), “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), and “The Tenant” (1976).
"The Tenant" displays the clear-eyed narative discipline of his early "Knife in the Water" and "Repulsion," but without the self-indulgent gimmickry that have made a lot of his later "personal" films, including "The Fearless Vampire Killers" and "What?", almost impossible to sit through even when the idiosyncratic talent behind them was visible.
"The Tenant," which opened yesterday at Loews Tower East, is the most successful and most consistently authentic Polanski film in years, and in saying that I realize that a lot of people prefer the Polanski who turns out films more or less tailored to popular tastes, like "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby."
Redeeming the carte blanche ticket he earned for Chinatown 's success, Polanski made The Tenant, a masterpiece of anguish that harks back to his earlier mindfucks Cul-de-Sac and Repulsion (in fact, The Tenant is all but a mirror image of Repulsion) while being more substantial than either of them.