TRE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
ROSEMARY'S BOOBY THE SCREEN The ending of Roman Polanski's The Tenant is ridiculous. After having lived some months in an old-fashioned Parisian apartment building, a young man (Polanski himself)...
...But the crux of the difficulties all along has been the former tenant in the young man's apartment...
...But Polanski is using these cinematic conventions as a pretext to be opaque himself...
...It has a photograph of hieroglyphics on it, and in the bathroom one night, the young man finds the same hieroglyphs graffitied on the wall...
...Soon he appears in his window again, and again he jumps, just as before, surviving the fall this time as well...
...One reason Polanski likes the mise en scene of horror films is that it is supposed to be mysterious, impenetrable, inexplicable...
...Maybe Polanski has had him jump twice in his predecessor's clothes because neither jump is occurring in reality...
...It's part of the world we all know...
...More likely, though, is the possibility that he has not gone far enough-at least, not far enough in any one, decisive direction to satisfy us...
...But Polanski's horror films try to stay close to the real world, and the causes for an action like the tenant's suicide attempt are therefore not dispensable...
...They're not...
...The young man has also seen other tenants standing immobilized for hours in the bathroom across the courtyard...
...A friend visited by chance turns out to have the same rancorous attitude towards his neighbors that the young man's seem to have toward him...
...The difficulties began even as he was renting the apartment, for the concierge (Shelley Winters) and landlord (Mel-vyn Douglas), while ostensibly formal and polite, also seemed somehow nasty, morbid and insinuating...
...For example, the young man's neighbors never really seem sufficiently distressing to drive anyone to suicide...
...He is committing her suicide as well as his own since both take place only in his mind...
...The ambiguities of art and life, madness and normality, drama and comedy, the imaginary and the real are all good subjects for a film, but Polanski thinks ambiguity and plain confusion are the same thing...
...He befriended a dirty, deranged old woman and refused to sign a petition for her eviction, but to his dismay she returned his kindness by omitting his doorstep while retaliating against the other tenants by befouling theirs...
...But unlike Cocteau's film, Polanski's has not been concerned with the relationship between art and life until the ending...
...The theater loges from which the other tenants applaud the young man's suicide leap suggest this, along with the fact that the young man and the filmmaker are the same person...
...We're not sure either way what the cause of his breakdown is, or whether there even is a cause that we are supposed to understand...
...So why drag it in then...
...I don't think Polanski knows...
...Although he says that the inconvenience of the bathroom in the building is of concern to him, it is more often with Stella, at a cafe or her apartment, that he has to make a dash for the John...
...Polanski likes to give an impression of complexity in his films, but too often that complexity is in truth only confusion and uncertain intentions...
...Like the New York co-op in Rosemary's Baby, the Parisian setting for The Tenant is not some Gothic castle on a remote cliff in the Alps...
...An irritating way that the concierge blows her nose is echoed by Stella (Isabelle Adjani), a friend of the former tenant whom the young man meets away from the building...
...This isn't true in a parody such as The Fearless Vampire Killers...
...Now, at the end of Polanski's film, the young man is so obsessed with the building and her death, he is standing out on the window sill himself wearing a dress of hers...
...We are in a world gone crazy that we don't expect to understand in a realistic way...
...They are just a snow job, an exercise in obscurity...
...It seems Polanski has gone too far this time, ruining with overstatement the climactic scene on which his whole film depends...
...But like hieroglyphs without a Rosetta stone, all these little image messages being sent to us by the film are ultimately indecipherable...
...but in The Tenant, as in Rosemary's Baby, Polanski has tried to creep away from the everyday world so stealthily that what is bizarre and frightening will seem to follow from what is ordinary and familiar...
...But in terror he drags himself bloodily across the courtyard and back up the stairs...
...I suspect in Chinatown he was attracted to doing a film noir because that genre's atmosphere is as a rule equally opaque...
...She committed suicide by jumping from the window and was not yet dead at the time the young man rented the apartment...
...Then the young man became embroiled in a feud in the building...
...After having lived some months in an old-fashioned Parisian apartment building, a young man (Polanski himself) is at the brink of suicide...
...Perhaps then the tenant's attempt results from hallucinations, or maybe the attempt itself is an hallucination...
...Polanski's ending is in fact lifted from Jean Cocteau's 1932 film Blood of a Poet, where the central character also commits suicide while, people in theater loges overlooking a public street applaud...
...Like a body hitting the pavement in a deadfall, it goes in all different directions at once...
...As other tenants applaud at the courtyard windows, which have turned into theater loges, the young man jumps...
...Polanski has presumably repeated the suicide leap for emphasis, in order to intensify our sense of horror at what has happened to the tenant, but the result is to dissipate that horror instead...
...A mysterious malady contracted in his apartment reflects an experience partying with Stella one night and getting sick afterwards...
...Indeed, the disposition of Paris at large seems similar to that in his building...
...Polanski has often taken pains to establish connections between one scene or circumstance in the film and another, but the connections do not seem in the end to have any meaning...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...What is the movie itself supposed to be, anyway, a horror film or a comedy...
...Even a postcard sent to the former tenant by a beau who doesn't know she's dead appears to fit into the building's internal affairs in an eery way...
...In fact Polanski has at times in this film worked hard to bond the world inside his tenant's building to the world outside...
...In the courtyard the other tenants crowd around in their night clothes and try to comfort the young man, who is still alive...
...The fact that the world depicted in a film is supposed to be insoluble doesn't mean that the film should be the same...
...Unfortunately, all suggestions that the tenant has delusions are as inconclusive as those that his neighbors have real malice for him...
...Yet another way to look at The Tenant's ending is as a meditation on art...
...In neither horror films nor comedies is it necessary, usually, to understand the characters' motivations...
...That's what is wrong with his ending...
Vol. 103 • August 1976 • No. 18
