By the mid-1970s, much had changed in the world of cinema since Hitchock dominated the suspense thriller genre fifteen to twenty years earlier. In America and Europe, sociocultural changes like the student protests of 1968 and hippie counterculture turned cinema into a freer and more glorious space, which was then quickly tinged with violence and existential anxiety. Films like Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960) will always be remembered for their impact in dealing with individual identity and how it conflicts with those around it, but by 1975, the gothic trope of the double continued down far more abstract, less traveled roads. In Italy, Luigi Bazzoni directed a bleak giallo about a woman losing herself and finding another self called Footprints on the Moon (1975). Then a year later, Roman Polanski directed and starred in a seemingly personal work called The Tenant (1976), in which his character moves into a Paris apartment and slowly begins to believe he is becoming the previous tenant, a woman who attempted suicide by jumping out the window. Both of these films are remarkable in that they dare to remain ambiguous, yet are still able to produce unsettling emotions of dread in the audience.
Footprints on the Moon begins with a framing device related to the title, in which we see desperate astronauts left stranded. A science fiction laboratory is run by Blackmann (Klaus Kinski) who is conducting isolation experiments on the moon. This all turns out to be a memory, daydream, and obsession with Alice (Florinda Bolkan), an introverted translator who realizes that she can’t account for the occurrences of a three day blackout. A torn up card in the trash leads her to a hotel in Garma, a small, seaside town that seems uncannily familiar. A number of the inhabitants believe she is a woman named Nicole, who was there just that past Tuesday. Is it possible that Alice is also Nicole? Who is Harry? And what does this all have to do with a stained glass peacock?
In The Tenant, Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski), a French citizen of Polish descent, looks for an apartment in a building owned by Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas). All of the neighbors seem hauntingly odd, but what’s even stranger is that Simone Choule, the previous tenant in the apartment is in the hospital, still alive after jumping from the third floor window. She soon passes away, and Trelkovsky moves in, quickly having a number of awkward encounters with those who already live in the building. This is further complicated by the gradual appearance of things having to do with Egypt and the study of Egyptian culture. As various neighbors try to heft their social influence, Trelkovsky becomes increasingly paranoid, taking solace in the feminine things that Simone left behind. Soon enough he is walking around the apartment in high heels, a dress, wig, and makeup, the walls closing in on all sides. Are the neighbors really out to antagonise him into suicide? And what does this all have to do with the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the bathroom?
Upon finally seeing Footprints on the Moon when Kier-la Janisse and Severin Films released it last year as part of the House of Psychotic Women box set, I immediately noticed the connections to The Tenant, which has been a persistent favorite over the years. They are both about people descending into paranoia, no longer even sure of who they are. Both films leave the audience identifying with the character going crazy, making it impossible to know if reality or their subjectivity is being presented to us. The two movies are both as much about social control as they are about individual choice. There is an awkwardness and claustrophobia in The Tenant that is not as apparent in Footprints, but still somewhere beneath the surface. The cafe workers who insist on serving Trelkovsky the same hot chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes that Simone used to order act as a friendly representation of outside social forces trying to influence who he is. Similarly, the inhabitants of Garma try to force the identity of Nicole upon Alice. But I guess this makes sense, right? They believe they had met her before. Trelkovsky and Alice’s experiences are just a microscopic version of the societal pressures we all experience, that we either acquiesce to or actively resist. The Tenant clearly shows how pushy neighbors are a casual reminder of the fascism that Polanski was born into during World War II--either you go along with their polite demands or be shunned as a social outcast. Footprints shows this more subtly with The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana seen outside the window of Alice’s workplace, one of the most recognizable Italian structures of the fascist era. These unwelcome implications against the two protagonists are compounded even more by the fact that they are from foreign lands. Although Trelkovsky is a French citizen, the policeman questioning him sees only a Polish man. Alice was born in Lisbon, Portugal, but lives in Italy. Her occupation as a translator shows her mastery at articulating the culture she lives in, yet she still seems out of place, using different last names--Campos and Cespi--at different times during the picture. The neighborly pressure Alice and Trelkovsky face is similar to the kind of pressure that Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) imposes on Judy Barton (Kim Novak) in Vertigo. People only tend to accept you if they can control you. The far more obvious Hitchcock influence in The Tenant comes with Rear Window (1954) references. At the beginning and the end, Trelkovsky looks out his window, seeing all of his neighbors leading their lives, only Polanski’s film is different--unlike Rear Window, the neighbors are looking back at him, expectant and waiting for him to perform.
Footprints on the Moon and The Tenant both have a gendered aspect to the way the protagonists interact with their communities. Alice has a bit of a soft butch style going on, with short hair and little makeup. Her appearance and style are as austere as her interior decoration, with an apartment full of whites and grays, and few objects filling it up. The contours of Florinda Bolkan’s face give her a much stronger look than most Italian sex symbols of the era. Her journey into femininity and sexual expression is much more subtle than the shift in The Tenant because her gender is not changing.
Polanski’s film is more recognizable as a queer text, although it is not usually championed as one, most likely because the director/star is a convicted child rapist and therefore persona non grata. If spectators can set that aside for the running time of the movie, the experience is fascinating and sometimes on the verge of being hypnotic.* Trelkovsky’s designation as a foreigner plays into his stance as an effeminate character from the beginning. His demure approach to Monsieur Zy and The Concierge (Shelley Winters) is followed by his acquiescence to the cafe waiter giving him Simone’s hot chocolate and Marlboros. Later when he is giving a party, he seems uncomfortable when a woman lays his head in her lap, despite his male friends’ frequent talk of blowjobs. Trelkovsky is a counterpoint to his raucous friend Scope's (Bernard Fresson) toxic behavior towards his neighbors. In a way it isn’t that surprising when he goes back and looks at Simone’s Black and yellow floral dress left in his dresser, although by the time he begins painting his nails and buying a wig, his mental stability is in question. The Tenant goes back to what Psycho did with Norman Bates years earlier--transvestitism and transgender characters are linked with violent mental illness. Only this time, Trelkovsky’s switch into the identity of Simone has a layer of empathy, in that she appears to be a victim of her nagging and devious neighbors. While Polanski sometimes chews the scenery once he is in drag with spirited lines (“You’ll never turn me into Simone Choule. Never!”) I never really feel like he is making fun of women or men who dress in drag. It seems far more like the time had just come where he decided to act in a role similar to the one Catherine Deneuve did a decade earlier in his Repulsion (1965). The Tenant fails as a trans allegory because it isn’t one. It seems far more like just a film detailing a person’s descent into madness.
Having only seen Footprints on the Moon recently, I was struck by the similarities it has to The Tenant. Thinking of the movies in context to each other offers a whole new perspective on Alice’s experience. The scene in which she puts on the red wig and speaks to the beautician shows just as powerful a transformation as Trelkovsky going full Choule in the privacy of his apartment. The beautician says, “That very light makeup I did for you on Tuesday. It changed your whole appearance… it made you look so much younger, more feminine. It was much better for the wig you picked. Shall we try it again?” Alice refuses, but we know she is conflicted, wanting to become Nicole, but for unknown reasons. Although her gender stays the same, she comes into her femininity just as much as Trelkovsky does.
Ultimately, the two movies are alike because they refuse to give the audience satisfying resolutions. It is a reminder of what Elisabet’s doctor tells her in Persona (1966), which I covered last week: “No one asks whether it’s genuine or not, whether you’re lying or telling the truth. Questions like that only matter in the theater, and hardly even there.” The Tenant and Footprints on the Moon are like real life in that nothing makes sense and they cannot be wrapped up theatrically. Instead the movies, and by extension, the protagonists, latch onto something that can give them some kind of a vague framework, regardless of whether it is logical or not. In Footprints it is the framing device involving the astronauts on the moon and their sinister manipulation by Blackmann. This could have been taken out and the film would operate in the same way, only just in a more perplexing manner. The moon is constantly in the back of Alice’s mind, and the whole imaginary conspiracy weighs on her, even though none of the other characters are even aware of it. It ends up being such a powerful force that she inevitably ends up as a patient at a neuropsychiatric institute in Switzerland, as the concluding title card states. The Tenant uses the oblique presence of Egyptology in much the same way as the astronaut story, but in this case it raises the possibility of supernatural happenings. We see Trelkovsky taking a framed Egyptian illustration off the wall, and of course finding the long tooth hidden inside a hole in the wall. The hieroglyph graffiti in the shared bathroom at the end of the hall had to have been put there by Simone earlier on. It would be too much of a coincidence that her special interest would coincide with graffiti put there by someone else at another time. The Egyptian presence is not completely explained, but is a part of the story just enough to make us consider that Trelkovsky could be possessed by some kind of supernatural spell. Although by the end, the way his neighbors react to his two jumps out of the window seem to show that Trelkovsky is just a mentally ill person completely preoccupied with a delusional conspiracy.
The Tenant and Footprints on the Moon may not be at the peak of storytelling about fractured identity transference--just because I don’t think cinema has even reached that peak yet--but they are two of the strongest entries into the subject. They also interweave with many of the other films I covered in the past few weeks. The Tenant is obviously influenced by Hitchcock films like Rear Window, Psycho, and The Wrong Man. Persona is aligned with Bazzoni’s and Polanski’s films in their unapologetic lack of resolution. The way that Alice often plays along and acts like she is Nicole in order to find out more information from the people around her is exactly like the way that the titular Mr Klein acts when trying to track down his doppelganger. There are so many other films about doubles and the transference of identity that I could just continue writing about it for many months. For example, Séverine’s secret identity as Belle de Jour (1967) is one that specifically focuses on sexual desire and kink. The two characters played by Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981) deserve further thought, as well as likening Sam Neill’s character to the tentacle monster or the always memorable Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). David Lynch has made a career of making films about split personalities like Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), although these may say more about the filmmaker himself than the audience. This gothic preoccupation with the fractured self endures as subject matter because we can never resolve the internal feelings that give rise to it.
*I encourage readers with ambivalent feelings toward Polanski and his work to read Samantha Geimer’s The Girl (Atria Press, 2014)