Film review: The Tenant #ThrowbackThursday

Polanski’s 1976 psycho-mystic-horror film, The Tenant is part of his Apartment Trilogy, which also includes one of his best-known works – Rosemary’s Baby. Unlike the latter, though, which has a straight forward ending, bizarrely supernatural as it maybe, the former is far more open to interpretation.

The story is about a young office going man, Trelkovsky, played expertly by Polanski himself, looking for an apartment in Paris. He moves into an apartment where the previous tenant, a woman by the name of Simone Chule, jumped off her window and died subsequently. Trelkovsky finds the residents in the apartment complex and in the neighbourhood strange and complaining, and soon after he starts believing that they are trying to drive him to suicide too, by turning him into Chule herself.

There are multiple ways of assessing the story, from the perspective that like in Rosemary’s Baby, here too, there is a cult around the protagonist (the Egyptian cult of the mummy?). Or it could be the story of a man who descends into madness, affected as he is by the previous tenant’s death or it could be something entirely different.

To my mind, the one potential interpretation that stood out most, however, was that both the previous and the later tenant were exactly one person, with two different personas. There is a reference to the earlier tenant Simone Chule’s interest in women rather than men. It is possible the character of Trelkovksy is her own projection of herself as male, killing her female self, and yet not being able to let go completely. Therefore, even as the second tenant himself, she continues to wear her old clothes and dress up as a woman. There seems to be some reason to believe this, since the tenant continues to receive letters for Chule and the neighbourhood café continues to serve Trelkovsky the same order as they did for Chule. In that sense, it is the conversion of a woman into a man, a psychological or indeed actual sex change.

It is also likely, that given Trelkovsky’s ambiguous tendencies, themselves, the example of the previous tenant helps him come out of the closet as well, as he is shown dressing up in drag. Unfortunately, he is unable to fully come to terms with his own self, and combined with an oppressive and dominating environment around him, ends up the same way as Chule.

Sitting in 2017, homosexuality is far more accepted worldwide, but apparently Paris was far more tolerant even in the middle of the 20^th century than many other parts of the world. By the early 1970s, the French law became more accommodating of homosexuality, and previous consideration of homosexuals as criminals became a thing of the past. It is still likely, though, that in popular consciousness there might still have been some resistance. Indeed, when France legalised gay marriage as late as 2013, there was a demonstration against it in Paris.

It could, therefore, be, that The Tenant is trying to portray what happens to a fragile heart and mind in the face of an inner conflict and outer oppression. But then, this is one of the many interpretations!