Tag Archive: Isabelle Adjani


THE TENANT directed by Roman Polanski (USA, 1976)

Psycho Tootsie - Polanski cross dressing.

Psycho Tootsie – Polanski cross dressing.

“At what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?”  This is the key existential question at the heart of a movie about one man’s descent into cross-dressing and insanity.

Like all the best mindfuck movies, The Tenant gets inside your head to the point that you are unsure where real fears end and paranoid illusions take over.

Set in Paris,  Polanski stars as the scrupulously polite Trelkovsky, a Polish man who gives every appearance of being an upstanding, serious-minded French citizen.

Strange things happen when he moves in to the apartment of Simone Choule, a young woman who has inexplicably attempted suicide and is not expected to live. Continue reading

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre  is essentially a homage to  F.W Mumau’s 1922 classic of  expressionist cinema – Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (“Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night”).

Visually it is spectacular and music from Popol Vuh and Wagner and the presence of a few hundred rats help to create a creepy atmosphere. Herzog’s intention was to recreate the scary  strangeness of the original but what he ended up making was one of the most unintentionally hilarious horror movies of all time.

When I first saw it in 1979, I came out of the cinema aching from having laughed so much.

Watching it again on DVD wasn’t quite as funny but there are still plenty of reasons why it is impossible to take seriously.

For example, when estate agent Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz)  arrives in Transylvania, he takes refreshment at a local inn. He announces his intention to visit Count Dracula’s castle whereupon the waitress drops a bottle of wine and all the clientele stop talking and stare in horror. The owner of the inn says, somewhat superfluously, that he would advise against this trip! Continue reading