+9
What I'm beginning to believe about the movie is that it's a ghost story or nightmare, constructed in an endless loop. Even during the opening credits, we see Trelkovsky in the window of the apartment. After the camera circles around the place and the credits draw to a close, showing the broken garden roof from the suicide attempt, it ends up at the same window with an image of a woman (the jumper) this time. Trelkovsky immediately shows up at the concierage who shows him the apartment. Trelkovsky mentions nothing about why he needs the apartment. In fact, we never see him living at any other place. The concierage does seem to show hearty glee when she talks about how the former tenant jumped out the window. Later, Monsieur Zy treats Trelkovsky with disdain and then says he likes him.
After Trelkovsky goes to the hospital (taking a bag of fruit (!?) for a comatose patient), he meets Stella. When the woman (who's entirely wrapped up in bandages, similarly to a mummy) begins to scream after Stella asks her if she recognizes her, the couple leave. I'm not going into the details about going to watch Enter the Dragon and making out in the theatre in this post. When Trelkovsky later learns that the woman has died, he immediately moves into the apartment although we never actually see him move. he has a box or two inside the apartment, but where they came from, I wouldn't know. He has his housewarming party with his friends who apparently all work together with him. Trelkovsky's biggest worry about the apartment was that the bathroom was on the other side of the courtyard on the same floor. His drunk friend even has to piss in his sink and complains that his apartment is lousy. Why did Trelkovsky take the apartment, how did he know it was available, who was the friend (or relative) who told him about it? We have no idea. However, I believe it's because of Fate or Destiny, and I believe that Trelkovsky has already gone through this transformation before. Why else does he see so many ghosts of himself throughout the apartment? Why else does the woman at the end of the movie, the same one we see early on with Stella, turn out to be Trelkovsky?
Stella has a friend who gives Trelkovsky a book which belonged to the dead woman. It was about Egyptology. Egyptian hieroglyphics make an appearance in the restroom in the one scene we see inside there. Now, it's true that Trelkovsky sees many people in the restroom not moving for hours, but the one time we see him in there, we can see him back in his own apartment, looking at himself through binoculars although he apparently doesn't recognize himself. Is it the actual apartment which is haunted? Are there other ghosts who are doomed to endlessly live a cycle of horrible life and attempted death in the apartment? Or is it just Trelkovsky? Or is Trelkovsky just insane? I don't really think so even though he's obviously hallucinating at times. But then again, why do the neighbors always complain of noise, even when there is no noise. Are they all trying to get to sleep (die) and keep having "newcomers", such as Trelkovsky, who haven't caught on to how to behave when you're dead, even if you have living friends?
You see, this is more interesting to me than a simple look at the film which says that Trelkovsky is crazy because we know nothing about him at all before the film begins and we learn very little about him afterwards, except that his friend tells him that he lets people walk all over him and he should take fuller charge of his own life. However, if it's clear that something strange is going on with Trelkovsky from the beginning, it sort of takes away some of the mystery too. You see; there's nobody to root for here, unlike Rosemary's Baby, which almost comes across as a documentary but at least reveals layers of reality one skin at a time. This film leaves it open but in a way that almost turns it into something pointless. I mean, it's not like The Innocents where we actually can see the results of peoples' behavior and mostly all understand them from different perspectives. The thing which maddens me about The Tenant is that there is no perspective, and I'm not even sure if the people in the movie actually do anything. The whole movie could just be Trelkovsky in the hospital bed reliving a nightmare. If so, what does that mean and why should we care?
__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page