Roman Polanski
L'inquilino del terzo piano

The story is based on a novel by Roland Topor, Le Locataire chimérique.

Trelkowski, a young clerk, goes to a Parisian building in search of an apartment. He learns that the former tenant, Simone Schule, is fighting for her life in the hospital after attempting suicide by jumping out of a window. When Trelkowski and a friend, Stella, visit Simone, she screams in terror and her condition worsens. When, a few days later, she dies, Trelkowski can move in.

In the building, the atmosphere is strange and heavy, with small pranks, revenge, and slander regulating the relationships between the tenants: Trelkowski finds himself constantly watched by the tenants and reprimanded by the landlord; furthermore, his routine is being redirected by the neighbors onto Simone Schule's routine. Gradually, these and other unsettling behaviors of the building's residents intensify until they verge on and surpass the absurd.

Thus, besieged on multiple fronts, the courteous and patient Trelkowski sees his neuroses grow: he begins to confuse his identity with that of Simone Schule and starts a personal and hallucinated rebellion, characterized by an increasing crescendo of violent and self-destructive behaviors...

In Roman Polanski's vast filmography, I think the films of the so-called apartment trilogy are the most intimate, emotionally powerful, or at least the ones that resonate with me; and in this personal ranking, Le Locataire, also known as The Tenant, certainly occupies the top position.

In The Tenant, amidst grotesque or insensitive characters, ridiculous or provocative figures devoid of any form of empathy for others, Trelkowski stands out as he attempts to understand the absurd, showing a human effort that excludes him from the ghostly world he has chosen to enter. On one hand, there is an attractive force that prevents Trelkowski from detaching from it, while on the other hand, there is opposition through civil behavior, a rational effort to understand the absurd.

The initial panoramic shot, on which the opening credits appear, is clarifying in this sense, as between the windows of the building and behind them hide immobile figures - men, women, or ghosts - that blend together as interchangeable and overlapping; among them is Trelkowski, who thus belongs to that fantastical and chimeric world but tries to transcend it first rationally and then with the aforementioned and desperate neurosis. This superhuman effort of the protagonist will inevitably be in vain: emblematic of this is the fact that the story opens and closes with the same desperate scream. Desperate is the human condition, and on the screen, one witnesses a clear allegory of it, as well as, on the other hand, the condition of the foreigner, the man uprooted from his own home.

A perfectly balanced and calibrated film in its three narrative parts but rich with surreal scenes. Among others, I recall the scene where the protagonist's rebellion begins, when in a lake, Trelkowski violently hits a child guilty of executing a dishonest act to his own advantage, but, above all, the nightmarish and dreamlike scenes that trigger the outbreak of neurosis, in which Polanski shows us through crooked angles the horror that has nested in the protagonist's mind. And again those neighbors' faces, shot from above, evoking fear and suspicion...

In short, an absurd allegory of life, which with an inexorable rhythm terrorizes the viewer who accepts to come to terms with their most ancestral desires and fears, in other words, to take upon oneself the mystery of things.