Saturday, October 8, 2011

Polanski's The Tenant (1976)




This has been listed in the top 100 films of all time.  I remember watching a countdown of just a list back in October of 2004, I can't remember exactly where on the list this fell, but I think it was somewhere in the 40's.  In any case, it's Kafka-esque tone really make for a serious nightmare world!  



Although it doesn't have an overt Jewish theme to, like Crimes and Misdemeanors, it does have a very creepy Jewish under current.  Of course, we all know that the director is famously Jewish; but the viewer also gets a very uncomfortable sense that all these people in this building (many of them strangely American) in Paris have an unspoken "concern" that Trelkovsky is a JEW!!  They behave with a very ugly caution around him, which only adds to the mounting horror that there is something really wrong with this building.  Afterall, the previous tenant threw herself out of her window.






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