Some movies can be read as easily as a fifth standard textbook. Others are as tough to decipher as the most abstruse poetry. The Tenant is a Roman Polanski movie that perhaps does not have a single interpretation as to its meaning – and that is quite the pleasure of watching a movie such as this. Trelkovski is a perfectly normal, if slightly more sober than the rest, tenant, who moves into the apartment of a woman (Simone Choule) who has recently attempted suicide and is lying in a hospital. The superficial relationship between Trelkovski and Stella, the persecution (or persecution complex) of Trelkovski, and the descent into depression and suicide, and the scream of a dying man (or woman?), bring out the angst of the immigrant, stereotyped, persecuted and inevitably given less than his due.
