Today I had the feeling that the quarantine will soon be over. There are people everywhere in the streets. Spring feeling. For all those who are still at home, we have our "Corona Cinema", a nice black comedy. In good quality, hand picked for you. By the way, it's on 13th place in our video store hit list, so only twelve films were rented more often!
Isabelle Adjani is one of the great secrets of cinema. She was always able to play women of all ages. She's always the right age. How does she manage this transformation? And always Adjani seems possessed. Her eyes sparkle ghostly. She's one of the most beautiful actresses of our time, but never gave herself up for sedate films. Look at her body language, which suggests such a wild being beneath the surface. She acts because she has to. Otherwise she'd burst. She loves to, and especially in eccentric projects like The Tenant. When The Tenant had its premiere in Cannes in 1976, the audience ran out of the cinema in droves. Contemporaries speak of a veritable flight movement. The reviews were accordingly negative and described Le Locataire not only as a bad film, but as a bottomless pit. The seriously shy Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski), applies for the apartment of a young woman, Simone Choule, who is dying in hospital after a suicide attempt. The young woman dies and he gets the apartment. It is located in a large gloomy building whose inhabitants are hateful people who spy on each other. There is also a cursed bathroom in the building and whenever Trelkovsky looks over, he sees a motionless figure staring at him. After a housewarming party that Trelkovsky gives for his friends, all hell breaks loose: the vicious neighbours complain about the disturbance of the peace and in future they will prosecute Trelkovsky if he even moves a chair. Perhaps it is the building itself that is malicious? All the residents in it are after Trelkovsky. It seems that his death is only a matter of time now, as craftsmen are already exchanging the broken glass front into which the previous tenant threw himself for a new one. Are the neighbors really after Trelkovsky or is he just paranoid? Trelkovsky begins to try on the clothes of his previous tenant Simone Choule and uses her make-up. Since he moved in, the cafe across the street has only offered him cocoa (which his previous tenant used to drink there) and Marlboro (which she smoked). As much as Trelkovsky craves his brand, Gauloises, they offered him Malboro. One of the reasons why Le Locataire was so badly smeared in Cannes may be the fact that Polanski did not direct a horror film, but a black comedy: Trelkovsky visits the hospital with a friend of Simone's, Stella (Isabelle Adjani), to inquire about the condition of his previous tenant. Simone will not recover from her injuries. After the hospital visit Trelkovsky takes Stella to the cinema and grabs her crotch during the performance. During a later rendezvous with Stella, Trelkovsky will step into a piece of dog shit. He is convinced that the roommates in the house are trying to turn him into Simone. Trelkovsky develops a manic passion to become Simone, which is not played out unfunny for us: Like a drag queen, he stands before the mirror in the clothes of the dead. Trelkovsky's attempts to report the incidents to the police end in fiasco. He is asked by name whether he is of Russian origin and is told that not everyone in France can call the police. Finally it breaks out of him when he is again denied the Gauloises in the cafe: "You are a gang of murderers!" Finally, the finale is staged by Polanski as slapstick. Le Locataire is a satire about the generation conflict based on the novel by surrealist Roland Topor: elderly neighbours from Paris in need of rest drive a young foreigner to his death. Le Locataire seems like a cheap trash film, like a British production from the 60s. Obviously Polanski had a hell of a time putting genre set pieces together to create a tastelessness. Le Locataire would certainly not be emptying the cinema today. I just saw it again, felt uncomfortable and sometimes I had to laugh with pity for Trelkovsky.
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