PLEASE NOTE UNUSUAL TIME!
This is a movie discussion group. While participants usually arrive having watched the film beforehand, you are invited to come and listen if you haven't seen the film yet.
“A Polish bureaucrat rents a Paris apartment, where he finds himself inexplicably drawn into a maelstrom of paranoia and delusion. Gradually he undergoes a strange change of identity."
THE TENANT (1976)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Gérard Brach and Roman Polanski
Based on the 1964 novel “Le Locataire Chimérique” by Roland Topor
With Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet and Shelley Winters
2 hours 6 mins.
Violence rating: medium
Available to stream on Hoopla and Kanopy, and to rent in a variety of places. Check https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=the%20tenant for details.
The third and least known of Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” (the others are “Repulsion” in 1965 and “Rosemary’s Baby” in 1968), “The Tenant” examines the downward spiral of an alienated stranger in an unfamiliar city—in this case, a meek Polish Jew in Paris. (In the first, a dazed Catherine Deneuve stumbles through swinging London; in the second, Mia Farrow’s naive midwesterner is forced to navigate a duplicitous and depraved New York). In each case, the rented domiciles become crucibles of extreme paranoia and the warping of identity. 1968 Polanski became a world-famous cinematic “it boy”; by 1976, he was known as the widower of a pregnant wife butchered by the infamous Manson Family. (In 1977, he would be arrested for the rape of a 14-year-old girl.) The film is based on a dark, Kafka-esque novel with a male protagonist, but Polanski casting himself is a particularly strange choice, having had the clout (that he would soon lose) to hire any of the biggest stars available. This choice cannot NOT suggest that his own life is being harrowed. Lest you think this is an anomaly in the feminine subjectivity of the other films, our protagonist shifts gender in the last third of this psychologically byzantine film. While cross-dressing had appeared in his earlier films (Donald Pleasence in garish makeup and a flimsy nighty in “Cul-de-Sac” [1966] has to be seen to be believed), this is a serious and sustained examination of . . . what? We at QUEER FEAR are, obviously, the most qualified to interpret, critique and judge this most bizarre and unsettling film.