Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy
The closest thing I've ever had to having my own apartment was the dorm room I lived in last year, but even though I was finally away from my parents, it hardly had all the perks that I imagine would come with living in my own place. Not only was the room tiny, but I had to share it with a kid who listened to Say Anything and went to bed at 11:30 every god damn night, preventing me from watching Adult Swim or playing video games or blasting Wu-Tang. On top of that, I had to share a bathroom with 40 other people, which I'm not going to go into, although I will mention that the last stall on the right, which I would use for pooping, was apparently rendered unusable about halfway through the year. (It wasn't fixed for the rest of the year, and I still have no idea what happened to it.) But, worst of all, I couldn't even smoke weed in my room without getting arrested. Fuck that! So, needless to say, I was pretty excited when my friends and I found an apartment to live in for the next year.
Unfortunately, director Roman Polanski (Chinatown, The Pianist) decided 40 years ago or so that living in apartments actually sucked ass, so he made a few movies that warned people that living in an apartment will turn you into a paranoid, psychotic mess. Also, a cross-dresser, but I guess that kinda goes hand in hand with the "psychotic mess" part.
Well, ok, that's really only in
The Tenant, the third movie in the trilogy.
Repulsion and
Rosemary's Baby share many themes with
The Tenant, but they each handle them differently. These three movies deal with the horrors of apartment living, and form a loose trilogy with many common elements. Here: let me tell you about them!
Repulsion (1965)Hey guys, meet Carole:
She's pretty cute, right? Look at how she lies on the floor and stares at the camera seductively, like she wishes you could come through the computer screen and join her on the wood-- or, uh, the floor. Wouldn't you like to just... absolutely ravish her? Well, too bad, because there's a reason this movie is called "Repulsion."
Carole is, I guess you could say, a bit spacey. She often finds herself staring into space, ignoring everyone around her as she gets lost in her wild imagination. She also seems to be extremely uncomfortable around men: early in the movie, a guy tries to set up a date with her; she tries to avoid it by saying that she's eating in with her sister that night. The guy then sets up the date for the next day, and Carole, never verbally accepting, rushes into her apartment. The next day, instead of going on the date, she sits on a bench and stares at a crack in the ground. Oh, did I mention that she's sexually repressed? Because that's important.
Carole lives in an apartment (!!!) with her sister Helene. Helene has a boyfriend named Micheal who, naturally, Carole hates. Whenever he stays the night, Carole is kept awake by the sounds of her sister's moaning. Yeah, they're bangin' in the next room, and apparently the walls are thin as paper. And when Carole throws Micheal's bathroom supplies away ("They don't belong in my cup," she says), Helene has the nerve to yell at her about it. What a bitch!
Anyway, Helene and Michael are going to Paris for a few days, leaving Carole alone. In an
apartment. In Roman Polanski's
apartment trilogy. Shit! Well, Carole's wild imagination starts to catch up to her, and they come to life in her apartment. I won't tell you everything that happens, but I will tell you that she gets molested by her hallway. Wait, what?
In
Repulsion, the apartment acts as a reflection of Carole's state of mind. As the movie progresses, space appears more and more distorted, cracks in the walls grow larger, and
her fucking hallway molests her. There's also an uncooked dead rabbit on the floor in one of the rooms (Carole and Helene were going to cook it for dinner one day, but Micheal showed up and Helene ate out with him instead) that, as I'm sure you would imagine, gets more and more disgusting every day.
One of the interesting things about this movie, and all of the movies in the trilogy, is that we're never really sure if what we think is happening is actually happening. If this one part was just a part of her imagination, how do we know whether or not this other part actually happened? The movie remains just ambiguous enough that you never really know for sure. If you've seen the movie, think about this: there's something in the last scene that you don't actually see, so it might not be exactly what you think it is. I've only actually seen the movie once so what I'm thinking of might not be as ambiguous as I think but still!
Rosemary's Baby (1968)[/b]
The second movie in the trilogy,
Rosemary's Baby, is also the most well-known and, arguably, the best. I think I went a little overboard with the
Repulsion section, so I'll try to keep this one shorter.
Rosemary's Baby is about newlyweds Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavettes). Actually they might not be newlyweds, but the point is that they move into an apartment in New York and, try as they might, they can't seem to have a baby.
One creepy nightmare involving a demon hand later, Rosemary's pregnant! Hooray! Her neighbors Roman and Minnie start hanging around the apartment more often, helping Rosemary with chores and giving her baby advice. They recommend the best doctor in town for her, and they start mixing her special drinks to have instead of those nasty pills that other doctors would recommend. That's very nice, but uh, they're kind of
old, and they hang around the apartment too much. It's kind of annoying! Guy assures Rosemary that they're just nice old people looking for some friends, and hey, guess what honey? The guy who got the part in the broadway play that I wanted just happened to go blind recently! Who would have thought!
Well, yeah, who would have thought? Are Roman and Minnie really just kind old people looking for some friends? How come whenever Rosemary and Guy visit their apartment, they take down all the pictures on the walls? And why the hell does Guy seem to like them so god damn much? Roman has some creepy fucking eyes. Rosemary's starting to get a little paranoid.
Eventually, the evidence starts piling up, and Rosemary's convinced that the baby in her belly is the child of satan. Yeah, the child of mother fucking satan. For some reason, Rosemary thinks this is a bad thing, but this is a movie, so I guess I can let that little detail fly.
That's the basic plot of Rosemary's Baby. So why is it a part of the Apartment Trilogy? The apartment plays another important role in this movie, although it might be a little less obvious than in
Replusion or
The Tenant. This time, the apartment seems to be a safe house or a place of comfort, but, dun dun dun, it's more than what it seems. The apartment kind of starts off as this new beginning for Guy and Rosemary; this representation of a new life they're going to lead. But it's not so much Rosemary's apartment that's a problem, but rather her neighbor's, Roman and Minnie, that creates the tension. On some nights, Rosemary swears that she hears some odd chanting going on in their apartment. And, as I mentioned earlier, Roman and Minnie take down the paitnings on the wall when Rosemary and Guy visit. And, of course, there's the totally awesome ending, which I won't reveal here, but I will reveal that it's pretty awesome.
As with
Repulsion,
Rosemary's Baby never makes it explicitly clear whether or not what you think is going on is actually going on, until the ending, when you realize it was all just a dream. Yep! Just a dream. Or maybe I'm lying. MAYBE YOU SHOULD WATCH THE MOVIE AND FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF.
The Tenant (1976)[/b]
I actually saw
The Tenant only a few days ago, so I'm not really sure what to make of it. Before I go into the plot details and all that shit, I want to say that I thought it was ok, but it might require multiple viewings to fully appreciate, so I'll watch it again sometime soon and let you all know what I think afterward.
The Tenant is about this polish dude named Trelkovsky (played by Roman Polanski himself) who moves into an apartment in Paris after the previous owner commits suicide. He also starts to hook up with the previous owner's best friend. To say the least, weird things start happening! The weird thing about this apartment is that it doesn't come with it's own bathroom; Trelkovsky has to walk down the hall to use the communal bathroom. He can actually see into the bathroom from his bedroom window. Every few nights, though, he sees people standing completely still in the bathroom for hours at a time just. staring. at. him. One of his friends suggests that maybe they're jerking it, the other wisely responds with "Can you stand completely still while masturbating?" (I'm paraphrasing here, but that's basically what he said).
By the way, this is an aspect that I really like about this movie. There's something about people STARING at you from a distance that I find incredibly fucking creepy, and this is a scare tactic that you don't see in a lot of movies! I guess a lot of horror movies are like HAHA HERE IS A MONSTER AND A LOUD NOISE, but this one's just like HEY, THIS MOTHER FUCKER'S STARING AT YOU. AND YOU CAN'T REACH HIM. AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. And I like that.
So yeah, shit happens, and eventually Trelkovsky starts going insane, and he becmes convinced that his neighbors are trying to turn him into Simone Choule, the previous tenant who killed herself. This is where the movie kind of fell apart for me; the part where he starts going insane seemed a little too abrupt (unlike
Repulsion, where the insanity more gradually developed), so I had a little trouble buying it. Granted, there is a scene where Trelkovsky asks, "When does a person cease to be who he thinks he is?" so I think the abruptness was kind of on purpose. I don't know, I'm going to have to watch it again. There's definitely more to the movie than what I got the first time around, so I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt. And you should too! Check it out; I think I'm actually making it sound worse than it actually is
As I mentioned way earlier in the article, living in the apartment turns Trelkovsky into a paranoid, psychotic mess. People are staring at him from the bathroom window. There's a hole in the glass where the previous tenant killed herself. Shit, half of the stuff in the apartment belonged to the previous tenant, who, by the way, killed herself. Also, half of Trelkovsky's neighbors blame him for making noise that he hasn't been making. What... what is going on!!!
I guess it's pretty obvious by now, but this movie, along with the other movies in the trilogy, doesn't explicitly state whether or not Trelkovsky's paranoia is justified until the end, when it turns out that he's actually caught in a cycle of death and rebirth by some egyptian curse or something. Or not. Find out for yourself.
Coming soon: I'm probably going to elaborate more on the common elements of the three movies, but it's like five in the morning right now so I'll just edit it in later I guess. CHANCES ARE you guys are going to barely read the topic as it is so we'll see!
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Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy