Le locataire [The Tenant] (1976)

(In French, On TV, August 2019) Ooh, spooky. No, not necessarily Le locataire as a movie, but how just yesterday I was thinking that in my acerbic critic’s dictionary, I should include two definitions for “psychological thriller”: First, “It’s all in their heads,” and second “while not strictly impossible, nothing like this has ever happened to anyone in the history of humankind.”  After coincidentally watching Roman Polanski’s Le locataire, I have even more fuel for my lapidary assessment: this is one exemplary psychological thriller, so much so that it boldly vaults into nonsense. To be fair, the setup is intriguing, as a young man apparently devoid of personality moves into an apartment recently vacated by a suicidal tenant. Things get much, much weirder after that, once the protagonist becomes convinced that his neighbours are plotting against him, that he starts cross-dressing, that he becomes so convinced that he is the suicidal tenant that he becomes the suicidal tenant. Or something like that. Polanski’s ingrate appearance serves him well here, as the film almost requires a strange-looking protagonist to sink into madness. I am not fond of the expressed link between mental illness and gender transition, but it’s such a weird movie anyway that I doubt that there’s a hate-driven agenda behind it. The protagonist’s sanity slips so thoroughly by the third act that anything can happen and everything may or may not be real. That kind of stuff may have been more interesting in the 1970s, but seem s so cheap and commonplace these days that it makes it rather easy to dismiss Le locataire as a bunch of nonsense.