Le locataire roman polanski biography
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His resolve unshaken, he pulls himself up the stairs and gives it another try. This move implies that any difference between what you see and the reality of the fiction will be clearly distinguished and has been from the start.
With this implicit promise on the part of the implied narrator, the final sequences are extremely confusing, perhaps leading the viewer to doubt the veracity of the entire narrative.
Le Locataire is primarily a psychological horror film with a tight grip on reality, unlike the supernaturalism of Rosemary's Baby or the hallucinatory quality of Repulsion. Tension mounts as the Parisian gothic characters become crueler, increasingly selfish, and strangely intolerant of noise. An often overlooked and little discussed film, Le Locataire (The Tenant, France/USA, 1976) explores the violence of the loss of privacy, and, like most of Polanski's films, examines the failure to cope with or surmount the look of the other.
He quickly descends into madness, and as an act of defiance and misguided self-assertion, he becomes determined to kill himself. The camera then cuts away from his view and we see him struggling alone. However, Le Locataire remains powerful because it does not rely solely on either narratorial or audience unreliability. Annoying neighbors, obnoxious Parisians and the mummy leitmotif become so pronounced through repetition that the viewer becomes a co-conspiracy theorist with Trelkovsky himself.
The audience's predilection to accept a proto-supernatural explanation, as we might find in a film by Dario Argento,[3] becomes so pronounced that at Trelkovsky's break with sanity the viewer is encouraged to take a straightforward hallucination for a supernatural act.
Upon moving in, Trelkovsky finds that the other residents exhibit bizarre quirks, such as a tendency to remain stationary in the bathroom for extended periods of time and a strange intolerance for noise.
It becomes impossible for him to live in his apartment as the aggravated thumping of his neighbors become more frequent and intense. The ambiguity and slight inconsistencies allow Polanski to artfully manipulate audience sympathy in a wonderfully disturbing film that offers new takes at every viewing.
Aaron Smuts
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However, the film can be viewed as a mostly consistent exploration of provoked paranoia, and tends to offer more support for this interpretation when watched with the foreknowledge of Trelkovsky's coming insanity.The viewing experience is much less enjoyable from a critical distance, as the film's effectiveness relies almost entirely on the audience to be as suspicious and susceptible as Trelkovsky.
The initial assumptions of conspiracy are so difficult to break, partly due to the extreme oddness of the building's occupants and the earlier finding of a human tooth inexplicably embedded in a wall, that the last scenes, especially the dream-mummy sequence, may seem utterly inconsistent. The implied narrator tells us that they are faithful to reality and has not been lying throughout the rest of the film.
As a child, he was ghettoised in Nazi-occupied Poland and had to pass as a Christian while living with family friends in his youth. Another standout performance is that of the all-too-often overlooked Shelley Winters as the concierge. Rapid cuts show the woman with her hands out, the other woman still standing in the corner and Trelkovsky being choked to death.
His earlier experience with the bitter woman and the other oddities of the building allow the viewer to think that Trelkovsky may be the strangulation victim of some sort of Spock-like magic.
He argues that "in [Le Locataire] the viewer remains trapped within the outsider protagonist's perspective even after any semblance of sanity has been lost for good."[2]
What makes Polanski effective is that Thompson's claim above is only partially correct.
From this uninhabited perspective, the narrator shows us a completely different man, most likely a door-to-door salesman. And of course almost everywhere he looks he sees his own reflection staring back at him in a mirror.
I can't think of any film that is more about the internalisation and solitude of one character.
The Tenant is good, with no major flaws, and Polanski was really on top form as a director, but it's not among his most gripping works.