L'Inquilino del Terzo Piano mkv There he is, sitting on the bench like a man waiting for a bus that never existed. Trelkovsky, the stranger, the illegal tenant of a life that isn’t his, an office colleague to himself, gazes at the park with those blank fish eyes that Polanski reserves for men who have already lost but haven’t yet signed their surrender. The park is the stage of functioning normality: children, mothers, little boats. The grand circus of those who still know what they want.
The child wants the little boat. That’s all. He wants the boat with a moral certainty that Descartes could only dream of, with a clarity of desire that no adult experiences after the age of seven—if they’re lucky. He cries. The mother — an emotional chain still intact, a sociological miracle — goes to retrieve it. Today she’d go and take a picture for Instagram with the caption “piccoli momenti grandi emozioni” and four hundred seventy hearts from parents who aren’t looking at their own children because they’re too busy putting on more hearts.
But it’s the seventies, so the mother simply goes. And in that thirty-second span without supervision, Trelkovsky gets up.
He goes over to the child. Calls him a stupid brat. Slaps him.
Here it is, the film’s great moral epiphany compressed into a gesture: the man who can’t say no to the landlord, who smiles at the neighbors plotting the erosion of his identity, who apologizes to everyone for simply existing — this man finally finds his courage, his determination, his presence of mind. And he uses it on a five-year-old boy, temporarily orphaned of his mother. Violence always travels downward, drops like a stone with cheerful enthusiasm, always finds someone who can’t answer back, who doesn’t have the tools, who weighs twenty kilos and was only waiting for his little boat.
It’s the supporting structure of Western civilization, in the end. The boss yells at the employee, the employee yells at the wife, the wife yells at the child, the child kicks the dog. Trelkovsky has skipped a few intermediate steps for the sake of narrative efficiency.
The philosophically heart-wrenching — and hilarious — thing is that Trelkovsky strikes exactly what he cannot be: someone who knows what they want. The child has a clear desire, a mother who responds, a little boat as an entirely sufficient existential horizon. Trelkovsky doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know where he lives inside himself, is slowly becoming a dead woman through the osmosis of cohabitation, and faced with this creature who cries with the absolute dignity of infant desire, he feels a cosmic rage, a metaphysical fury. You still have your emotional chains intact. I found mine already severed when I arrived, like telephone wires in a vacant apartment.
Polanski then — and here the game becomes dizzying — plays this character himself. It’s the director who slaps the child. The author punishing innocence with his own certified face. No distance, no actor-lightning-rod. It’s me, says Po funzionante: gesto: essere:
