The Tenant (1976)

          Roman Polanski’s most perverse movie—and that’s saying a lot—is almost certainly his 1976 psychological thriller The Tenant, which features such provocative signifiers as cross-dressing, duplicity, psychological torture, and suicide. Taken solely at face value, the picture is bewildering and nasty. Embraced as satire, however, The Tenant represents a wicked commentary on the madness of contemporary life and the toxic influence that inhumane social structures can have on individuals. Yet while many other Polanski movies lend themselves to straight analysis, with narrative symbols clearly representing specific psychological and/or sociopolitical concepts, The Tenant is deliberately ambiguous. Whether the movie feels playful or pretentious depends on the individual viewer’s perspective, of course, but as with all of Polanski’s work, elegant visuals and peerless technical aspects demand attention. In other words, The Tenant can’t be dismissed as a lark, even though it’s entirely possible that’s how Polanski approached the project.

          The auteur himself stars as Trelkovsky, an everyman who rents an apartment in an old Paris building. The unit became vacant when the previous tenant, Simone, jumped from one of the room’s windows and nearly died. Trelkovsky’s motivations are murky from start to finish. He visits Simone in the hospital, where she’s bandaged from head to toe, then meets Simone’s beautiful friend, Stella (Isabelle Adjani). The duo bond—if that’s the right word, given the morbid circumstances—by witnessing Simone’s death after a sudden emotional outburst. Later, as Trelkovsky explores his peculiar relationship with Stella—for instance, he never dispels her incorrect assumption that Trekovsky and Simone were friends—the protagonist experiences an even weirder dynamic with his new neighbors. Eventually, our “hero” comes to believe that building residents including Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas) and the never-named concierge (Shelley Winters) are scheming to transform Trelkovsky into a replica of Simone. Hence the aforementioned cross-dressing and, inevitably, Trelkovsky’s own suicide attempt—or, if the climax is interpreted differently, his victimization by would-be murderers.

          The Tenant has a muted, dreamy look courtesy of genius European cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and composer Philippe Sarde lends an appropriate degree of menace to the soundtrack. Plus, as always, Polanski’s sly camerawork, distinguished by cleverly hidden cuts and moves, brings viewers into the action with seductive ease. The singular mood of The Tenant has undeniable power, an effect accentuated by the opacity of the performances. Polanski’s acting is strangely charming, although he’s got an impenetrable quality, while supporting players including Adjani, Douglas, and Winters merely represent colors in the movie’s surreal tapestry. As written by Polanski and frequent collaborator Gerard Brach (working from a novel by Roland Topor), The Tenant is unrelentingly odd in every aspect except its storytelling. And that, perhaps, is the most devious aspect of the picture; instead of delivering a cryptogram of a narrative via wild style, Polanski serves this peculiar dish on a bed of classicism. This has the effect of suggesting that, on some level, the real world provides such inherently insane context that the weird events of The Tenant make perfect sense.

The Tenant: FREAKY

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

          Offering a harrowing but sensitive look at an obscure historical figure, the acclaimed French film The Story of Adele H. is significant as the movie that brought actress Isabelle Adjani her first international notoriety. Although the picture is very much an auteurist statement by director/co-writer François Truffaut—the most consistently accessible filmmaker to emerge from the celebrated French New Wave movement of the ’60s—his gifts were known to world audiences by the time this film was released. Therefore, the discovery of the picture is Adjani’s fearless acting.

          Portraying a young woman who throws away social position and wealth in Europe in order to chase a caddish soldier across the Atlantic, Adjani incarnates disturbing qualities of delusion, mania, obsession, and self-destruction. During the course of the movie, we literally watch a soul depart a body as Adjani’s character succumbs to madness. The performance is all the more noteworthy given Adjani’s arresting beauty—since the easier path of appearing in decorative roles was surely available to her, it’s impressive the actress chose challenging work. And because The Story of Adele H. set a template for many later Adjani roles, it’s fascinating to see how good she already was at portraying instability in this, her first major screen role.

          The story begins in Halifax, Nova Scotia, circa 1863. A refined but skittish French beauty (Adjani) arrives on a boat from Europe, and then takes up occupancy at a boarding house. She gives each person she meets a different explanation of her identity, eventually settling into the alias of Miss Lewly. In fact, Adele is the daughter of Victor Hugo, the great French literary and political figure. We soon learn that Adele is in love with Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robins0n), a British military officer stationed in Halifax. They were involved briefly in Europe, an interlude Adele mistook for the beginning of a lifelong romance.

          A callous gambler who moves from one lover to the next without a backward glance, Pinson doesn’t return Adele’s continued affection, so he’s startled to find she crossed an ocean to be with him. Adele’s fixation on Pinson grows stronger each time he spurns her, so even as Adele builds a network of supportive friends in Halifax—and even as Victor Hugo writes heartbreaking letters begging for her return home—Adele disappears into her fantasy of predestined love. She spends hours in her dark room writing a “book” that is actually just the ramblings of a troubled mind, and she humiliates herself by claiming that she’s married to and pregnant by Pinson.

          Truffaut tells the story largely in blackout sketches—appropriately, like chapters in a gloomy novel—and he steadily tracks Adele’s transformation to a skeletal wastrel wandering the streets in rags. Some of Truffaut’s storytelling devices feel forced, like the trope of Adele reading her own writing out loud as she works, but in general Truffaut approaches the material unobtrusively, often letting the bottomless mysteries of Adjani’s face fill the screen for long, wordless moments. Furthermore, one could argue that the lack of development in supporting characters is a way of helping viewers see the world through Adele’s myopic vision.

          Ultimately, The Story of Adele H. is a cold-blooded exercise, more clinical study than emotional journey, but for those willing to embrace the piece on its own terms—literary, meticulous, psychological—it’s a potent inquiry into the fragility of the human heart.

The Story of Adele H.: RIGHT ON

The Driver (1978)

          Fast, stylish, and taut, The Driver is an audacious experiment in cinematic minimalism. Eschewing conventional elements like backstory, character names, and emotional life, writer-director Walter Hill presents an action movie comprised merely of situations and forward momentum; the fact that a certain kind of ambiguous character study emerges from this Spartan storytelling speaks not only to Hill’s craftsmanship but also to the depth of his commitment to themes of individuality and male identity.

          The Driver (Ryan O’Neal) is a Los Angeles wheelman who freelances for crooks, providing his expensive services during high-speed getaways. The Driver’s reputation has spread beyond the criminal community to the world of law enforcement, so the Detective (Bruce Dern) devotes himself to catching the Driver. Caught between them is the Player (Isabelle Adjani), a casino gambler who witnessed the Driver performing a crime but refuses to ID him for the Detective’s benefit. When these characters converge, the Detective forces a situation that puts the Driver in league with reckless thieves willing to betray anyone and everyone for the right price.

          Taking place mostly at night, and set in evocative locations like a cavernous warehouse and L.A.’s iconic Union Station, The Driver is a sleek underworld poem. Nobody trusts anybody, and yet people must rely on each other to get their jobs done, so disconnected souls rise and fall based on their luck in picking the right partners. For viewers who buy into Hill’s singular approach, The Driver is a metaphorically rich meditation on the bleak moral relativism shared by killers. Yet others might find The Driver pretentious and vacuous, merely a symphony of attractive actors, cool shots, and exciting sequences.

          For me, the beauty of the picture is that it justifies both reactions—it’s a deep statement if you’re inclined to explore its enigmatic textures, and it’s empty fun if all you want to do is enjoy its visceral pleasures.

          Cast for their surface qualities rather than their acting chops, O’Neal manifests a cynical swagger that works well in this context, while Adjani’s dark beauty suits Hill’s nocturnal aesthetic. Dern manages to slip in a bit of characterization despite the script’s restraint, so he steals the movie by dint of presenting a recognizable personality. However, the acting in The Driver is really just part of Hill’s overall palette, because this is the action movie as art piece—whenever Hill commences a chase scene or a tense standoff, he reveals his innate mastery of primal signifiers and visual economy. In his hands, a car zooming across a nighttime highway is a brushstroke across a canvas, and a fragment of dialogue is a world of implied psychology.

The Driver: GROOVY

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

          Nearly a decade after their astonishing first collaboration, 1972’s historical allegory Aguirre, the Wrath of God, German director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski reteamed for this audacious remake of a silent-cinema classic: F.W. Murnau’s 1922 frightfest Nosferatu. In addition to being one of the titanic works of early German film, the Murnau picture is infamous because the filmmaker didn’t get permission to adapt his story from Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula. To disguise the source material, Murnau ditched Stoker’s character names and replaced the suave bloodsucker of the book with a ghoulish spectre whose pale skin, pointed ears, and talon-like fingers added up to a horrific vision.

          Herzog’s remake retains the look of the 1922 vampire, but by adding dialogue and a script filled with weirdly humanistic nuances, he transforms the monster of the original film into a pathetic creature. As played by Kinski with a beguiling mixture of pathos and villainy, Count Dracula (Herzog reverted to Stoker’s character names) is a desperately lonely being doomed to outlive everyone he knows and fated to survive on the blood of the very people whose company he craves.

          In this context, an existential love triangle develops between Dracula, the German real-estate agent who travels to Dracula’s castle, and the agent’s beautiful wife. Dracula subsists on the agent’s blood, and then he falls for the wife, who in turn risks sacrificing herself to the vampire’s bite as a way of releasing her husband from supernatural servitude. Herzog captures this bizarre dynamic in an appropriately odd style, employing lyrical montages of the European countryside and long dialogue scenes to convey a sense of otherworldly ennui.

          Yet Herzog’s most extravagant flourishes are the scenes depicting the terrible pestilence that arrives with Dracula when the ghoul relocates from his native Transylvania to Germany. According to the lore surrounding this movie, Herzog let thousands of rats loose into the town where he was shooting because he wanted “real” shots of vampire-loosed vermin stalking the streets; in addition to irking animal-safety experts, Herzog was reportedly chased from the town.

          Whatever the circumstances, there’s no question that Herzog captured something truly singular with his cameras: Nosferatu somehow manages to be one of the coldest vampire films ever made and also one of the most emotional. Kinski’s eccentric performance dominates, but New German Cinema stalwart Bruno Ganz provides a stalwart presence as the real-estate agent, and fearless French leading lady Isabelle Adjani (playing the wife) nearly qualifies as a special effect. In addition to providing offbeat soulfulness, she’s so beguiling that it’s easy to understand why she drives Dracula batty.

          Take note that Nosferatu is widely available in two versions, which were shot simultaneously. The incrementally superior German-language version is called Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht, and the English-language version is a decent alternative for the subtitle-averse.

Nosferatu the Vampyre: RIGHT ON