Aidan Codd BA Hons CG Arts & Animation .: The Tennant by Aidan Codd

The tenant by Roman Polanski,

1976 , review

By Aidan Codd.

‘Figure 1 is a post of the tenant’

The film the tenant is about a French man trying to get a flat, but he has to wait until the health of the previous tenant gets worse who is in a coma caused by jumping out of the window of the apartment. The man gets a flat when the previous tenant dies. As the man stays there he gets complaints over nothing, and over the time of the film the man goes mad and dresses up as the previous tenant who was a woman. He ends up getting so paranoid over all the complaints that he jumped out of the window, just like the previous woman who lived there he ends up in a coma and looks just like the woman in the hospital as seen in ‘figure 2’. The end scene is of the man looking at himself looking down on him in the coma as if it was a continuous loop of life that never ends. The film has an amazing technique of showing the constant conflict of madness of this man in his apartment room, in the simplest of ways by showing the constant conflict of the neighbours complaining. The ending of the film is peculiar in a surreal way showing a never-ending circle of torture as the man sees himself from the position of the coma to the position of standing up next to himself, and it really portrays an amazing sense of losing your mind. It worked well because ‘it's not strictly about madness, through its narrative form. It is about emotional isolation as it becomes physical. The forces that occupy Trelkovsky’s mind were invented by him, the outsider.’ (Times, 2010) As well as that you also see him ‘effectively putting himself through hell. A timid cleric rents a Paris apartment formerly occupied by a suicide victim and he slowly goes mad’ ( Anderson , 2003 ) as seen in ‘figure 2’ so as you can assume a very surreal and confusing film.