The Tenant
This week the From Below is showing *The Tenant *(1976), directed by Roman Polanski, on Thursday, September 18th at 7pm.
Here is the link to RSVP! Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10.
You may or may not know about my fascination with the junk mail still arriving for many of the prior occupants of the From Below and the smudged portraits those letters paint of them and this building I’ve called home for 4 years. *The Tenant *scratches that particular archaeological itch of mine.
A Polish immigrant to France rents an apartment furnished by the previous tenant’s belongings. He launches an obsessive investigation into the life and identity of the prior inhabitant, all the while navigating the bizarre and absurd mundanities that come with coworkers, hostile fellow tenants, and landlords in a land foreign to him.
The film is a darkly comic and unsettling Kafkaesque horror-thriller about the alienation and not-at-home-ness that comes with immigrating to a new country. What makes the film exceptional, beyond how incredibly photographed it is, the memorable characters, or just how far it goes, is the way that tenancy is elevated to an ontological condition. It looks at an array of temporary, uncomfortable occupancies that make up the living of a life: of place, body, identity, language, custom. Everything is rented, temporary, fleeting; borrowed elements that precede us in the already made-up-yet-still-unfinishable worlds we’re thrown into. We’re made to inhabit these uncomfortable rooms and make them “our own” as best we can, haunted and molded by those that came before. The fits chafe and gel unevenly, well for some and rendered impossible for others.
From a Rented Room,
Stefan, Charlie, and Stark
P.S. See you tomorrow at the BBQ!