The Tenant. 1976. USA. Directed by Roman Polanski. Screenplay by Gérard Brach, Polanski, based on the novel by Roland Topor. With Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Shelley Winters. DCP. 126 min.
Polanski plays a French citizen with a foreign name who rents a Parisian apartment whose previous occupant had leapt from a window under mysterious circumstances. A meeting point between Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant (an adaptation of French-Polish artist Roland Topor’s surrealist novel) is another nightmarish depiction of mistrust, paranoia, and the maliciousness of human nature, in which a man’s willingness to follow his neighbor’s rules to gain acceptance from an unwelcoming community fuels a mental and physical transformation with macabre consequences. Entirely shot in Paris, where the director was born before his family moved back to Poland in 1937, The Tenant is perhaps Polanski’s most personal film; his childhood memories of fleeing the Nazis with another identity, tragic deaths, and the endurance of antisemitism fuel a story of someone living as an exile in their own body.