Roman Polanski
L'Inquilino Del Terzo Piano

THE REVIEW

The oblique and alienated gazes of the building's tenants, with their arched eyebrows and eyes always too big or too small, rest one foot in the real and one in the fantastical; they are the lever that flings open the boundary between what exists and what does not. And it is within this expanded boundary that the clerk Trelkowski dwells, the prototype of Kafkaesque Mr. K archetypes and the archetype of future Sclavian Nobodies. He is man declensed in fear of living or, if viewed in negative, the fear of living declensed into man.

Trelkowski takes up residence in a Parisian apartment building, a sort of anthill which could be minuscule or infinite (would you dare to draw its layout?), a cement-made catalyst of angsts where it wouldn't be surprising to stumble upon an Egyptian sacrificial rite just behind a slightly hidden door. In short, a door to darkness and fantasy, yet so full of mediocre and bourgeois people (whose barely expressionist physiognomy, however, betrays a hallucinated identity). The previous tenant of Trelkowski's apartment, Simon Choule, lies on the brink of death in the hospital after a suicide attempt. The attempt fails at first, but the girl eventually dies. And here begins the second segment of the loop awkwardly (or divinely, if you will) cut by Roman Polanski.

The most extreme malaise translates into significant-meaning wide angles unraveling in a grotesque register always one step (never, however, fully taken) from Buñuelian mockery, in a deathly irony embodied by characters reeking of infernal circles. Yes, what's described in "The Tenant" is a vertically developing hell, gazing (in a significantly meaningful way) at our world from above.

A formidable phantasmagoria on being (and on HAVING to be, or on NOT being).

A gem of a fantastical story.

Or, if you prefer, a simple and refined sprinkle of angst on the ordinariness of certain old apartment buildings.