Friday, July 30, 2010

The Tenant (1976)

The Tenant is a creepy movie from great director Roman Polanski, where he also played the main role. The 18 certificate made me expect something horrible - or horrible things - to happen and after the main character started to see a very weird thing, i.e. people stand in a bathroom opposite his room - just stand without doing anything - the tension was so high and I couldn't take it anymore. I stopped the DVD. I continued to watch it again the next day. That time I remembered how I hated to be scared. In the end I was glad there was no close up of ugly, terrible face, complete with loud soundtrack to make me jump.

Stella and Trelkovky visiting Simone

Roman Polanski plays Mr. Trelkovsky, who is looking for an apartment in Paris. We get the idea how hard it is to obtain a room in those days. Trelkovsky arrives in a building with a knowledge that a room is available. The concierge later tells him that the previous tenant, Simone Choule, is now in hospital after throwing herself out of the window. Trelkovsky visits Simone and meets Stella (Isabelle Adjani, still beautiful with those large glasses), a friend of Simone. Simone screams when she sees them, although Stella believes it's Trelkovsky who is the cause. The owner of the apartment building, M. Zy, tells Trelkovsky not to make any noise if he wants to keep the room. We will see the first mysterious thing: the disappearance of scattered garbage on the stairs. And later, when Trelkovsky looks at the bathroom which lies opposite his room, there are people (one at a time) inside, who are not doing anything. When he himself is sick and has to go to the bathroom (there is none inside his apartment), the walls are full of hieroglyphs, and look through the bathroom's window, he can see his room and himself, staring at the bathroom. About the noise, Trelkovsky only make noise one time when his friends come to visit him in his new apartment and he discards them a minute after the complain. However, there is a petition against him because he makes too much noise. He then starts to believe that the other tenants has been trying to make him crazy so that he follows Simone Choule's step. Is it true? Who is insane? Has he been hallucinating? To prove to the other tenants that he can fight ["They want to drive me to suicide. All right. I'll show them," he says], he wears a female wig and Simone's nightgown - what a strange idea! The ending becomes the beginning, makes it all an unending nightmare.

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