The Tenant

With the form of a psychological thriller-cum-horror story The Tenant appears to be a distant echo of much superior 1960s films dealing with the breakdown of individual identity such as Nicolas Roeg's Performance and Joseph Losey's The Servant and hybridizing it with Polanski's own Rosemary's Baby in this story about a slef-effacing little clerk who takes the apartment of a woman who has committed suicide, only to find that he is re-living her mental breakdown. 

Scripted by Polanski with his regular collaborator Gérard Brach, had the pair decided to play it straight this might have been an interesting film, but at times the film reaches such a level of absurdity or ridiculousness that one would be forgiven for thinking that Woody Allen had had a hand in the script.  With the director in the lead in full drag hamming it up for all he is worth, a ludicrous ending and often badly dubbed dialogue the result is more prolonged self-indulgence than comedic although it's not really much of anything at all.

How much of this is intentional is hard to say but either way it doesn't work (wasting the talents of Sven Nykvist as cinematographer seems to be entirely symptomatic of Polanski's perversity). The best one can say is that the film is marginally more appealing that his 1967 Hammer horror spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers. And yes, Stella, the character who looks like Annie Hall with ringlets and bee-stung lips is played by Isabelle Adjani.

 

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