The Insanity of Roman Polanski

Let me start off by saying if you are hoping for a blog post about Roman Polanski's personal life, I will be a huge disappointment to you. I apologize ahead of time, and assure you it is not the first time I have disappointed someone... ask some of my exes.

What I want to talk about instead is Polanski's cinematic triptych about decaying sanity called his "Apartment Trilogy": Repulsion (1965), Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976). Although made a little over ten years apart, and based on different source material, these three movies have very similar elements that make watching them together a trip down a bizarre rabbit hole of Polanski's twisted design.

Let's start with Repulsion. This dark little number was Polanski's first English-language, full-length film. Set in London, it follows young manicurist Carol (a luminous Catherine Deneuve) who has a case of man trouble. The trouble is, she doesn't want them around. She blows off (not literally) a date and is grossed-out by her sister's boyfriend's razor being left in her toothbrush glass.

When the noise of her sister screwing wafts through the wall of her bedroom, it's all she can do to keep from pounding on it and telling her to knock it off. So when her sister takes a vacation to the leaning Tower of Pisa, you would think it is a good opportunity for Carol to get some alone time. The problem is, Carol's not alone.

Carol hears noises outside her bedroom door, and the walls start to crack. Soon men are appearing in her room, raping her. She can no longer concentrate at work, mutilating rich, white cuticles as she stares into space.

Polanski films these episodes so that we know Carol is hallucinating- but it is so skillfully done that we can't help but join Carol in her first-person madness. The problem intensifies when real men show up in the apartment and Carol is assaulted. The imagined men are joined by the corpses of real ones.

Polanski uses Carol's homespace as a representation of Carol's headspace. The claustrophobia of the apartment mirrors Carol's stifling fears of men. The gaping cracks in the wall are cracks in reality. The decaying food a symbol of the rotting away of Carol's mind.

What is so interesting about Repulsion is that the focus is less about explaining why Carol goes off the tracks, and more about the visualization of madness- the creating of an atmosphere that makes us experience Carol's downward spiral rather than explain it. The film closes with a close-up of a picture of Carol as a child creepily standing out from a family portrait. Apparently she was just born that way.

Repulsion was a very successful independent import, and it turned out to be an excellent dry-run for Polanski's first high-profile Hollywood project, the controversial Rosemary's Baby. Based on the popular Ira Levin best-seller, Rosemary is the story of young New York City newlyweds Guy (John Cassavetes married to Gena Rowlands at the time) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow getting divorced from Frank Sinatra at the time) who move into a new apartment to start their lives together. After a visit  from their kooky next-door neighbors (Sidney Blackmer and Oscar-winning cutie patootie Ruth Gordon) Guy's acting career takes off, and Rosemary gets a bun in her oven.

The American dream sours, however, when Rosemary sickens and suspects that there's something not right with the bundle of joy growing inside her. Add to that she fears her neighbors are more than just herbal supplement enthusiasts. And why is Guy always defending them? Are they in cahoots?

As with Repulsion, Rosemary focuses on the question of sanity. Are Rosemary's wild suspicions about Satan worshipers and visions of being raped by the Devil real, or is she losing her mind?

The questions of sanity go from affecting a single woman as the target of men's advances (poor Carol's dilemma) to a young wife bearing the burdens of motherhood both physical and social. Polanski's surreal shooting and editing styles create absorbing, visual madness, making us doubt Rosemary and what we ourselves have seen.

Here too, the apartment is a centerpiece for depicting this internal conflict. The apartment is isolated by the dark, decrepit hallway, and Rosemary hears strange, unintelligible whispering from the other side of her bedroom wall. It's as if the apartment is set aside from reality. Rosemary has to try and discern what's going on outside the walls of her own perception.

In the end, Rosemary discovers the truth by finding a secret passageway that leads her from what she thinks she knows in her apartment to the secrets enshrined in the world next door.

Rosemary was a huge hit and made Polanski a hot director in Hollywood. But a year later, he would experience his own real-life horror movie when his wife and unborn child were murdered by the Manson Clan in their home. (I guess it's hard to avoid Polanski's f-ed up personal life.)

In 1976 after getting an Oscar nom for Chinatown (1974), Polanski returned to the theme of apartment insanity with The Tenant. In this film Polanski cast himself as Trelkovsky, a man who snags an apartment in Paris because the former occupant, Simone, jumped out the window. Feeling guilty for getting an apartment because of someone else's misfortune, Trelkovsky visits Simone in the hospital, only to find her encased in a body cast unable to speak.

She lets out a big scream and croaks, though, when Stella (Isabelle Adjani) arrives. This doesn't prevent Trelkovsky and Stella from going to the movies and fondling each other.

Trelkovsky's stroke of real estate luck goes south as his neighbors and the concierge (the eternal Shelley Winters) begin to nag him about the noise from his apartment. He begins watching his neighbors through windows- seeing their forms and their shadows- a voyeur of the outside world instead of a part of it.

He is absorbed in the grungy apartment, finding a hole in the wall that contains a tooth, and Simone's dress stuffed in a cupboard. Paranoia morphs into personality incoherence as Trelkovsky begins to believe he is Simone- dressing up like a woman; gushing over shoes and realizing, "I think I'm pregnant,"; and finally jumping from his window mimicking Simone's fate.

The film's spiral into weirdness is only heightened by the fact that Polanski is the main character. He is the director of two previous films about women going insane who then directs himself as a man who turns into a woman who goes insane. The final scene with all of the neighbors watching his meltdown as if he is on a stage leaves us with the feeling that Polanski was struggling with the very public exposure of his work and tragic private life.

His life had become a must-watch horror movie, so he blurred the lines between his life and his art- by literally inserting himself  into the surreal visions that he had depicted in his earlier films. It's one of the strangest descents into madness by a character (and perhaps a director) in film.