A very quiet building in Paris - just the location for nebbishy Trelkovsky (played by Polanski himself) to find that 2-room apartment. So the previous tenant threw herself out the window ("You can still see where she fell," chortles concierge Shelley Winters)... who cares, when there's the possibility of romance with her friend Isabelle Adjani (star of Truffaut's Story of Adele H)? But then people stand for hours staring out the window of the communal toilet across the courtyard; neighbors complain about noise from his apartment during hours when Trelkovsy hasn't been home; a petition circulates to evict another tenant and her appearing-and-disappearing crippled daughter; and in a hole behind his armoire he finds... a human tooth? And via friends, creepy books on ancient Egypt, even clothing of the dead woman, the tenant finds himself inexorably turning into...
In his immediate follow-up to the smash Chinatown, Polanski returned to the terrain of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, and to the actual locations of his post-Poland lean years in Paris, with Bergman's great cinematographer Sven Nykvist (Persona, Cries and Whispers, etc.) contributing appropriately creepy photography ("He gives the film the look of something by Dostoevsky." - Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker); and a bizarrely mixed Hollywood and French cast: Winters, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, and Gallic actors-writers-directors Michel Blanc (Monsieur Hire, Dead Tired) and Josiane Balasko (Too Beautiful for You, French Twist). But it's the director's own bizarro performance as the put-upon Trelkovsky that makes this deadpan journey into urban paranoia off-beat even by Polanskian standards.
"Somewhere between Franz Kafka and William Castle."
- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
