This fine short film shows up the serious deficiencies in Polanski's version of Roland Topor's wonderful story.
It keeps closer to the original, and does not dissipate it with pointless elaborations, nor injure it with Polanski's inexplicable omissions. Neither is the atmosphere of this French version spoiled by the tasteless intrusion of inappropriate black humour, nor the badly judged indulgence in ridiculous melodrama which Polanski's version suffers at the end. It is also infinitely improved by being in French, and not the jarring Yankee voices of the actors Polanski uses.
But certainly the greatest improvement on the 1976 version is the wonderfully androgynous presence of François De Brauer in the crucially ambiguous role of the new tenant: Polanski unwisely cast himself in this role, and made it ridiculous.
Marek Nurzynski, the otherwise unknown director of this film, is to be congratulated on his altogether more delicate handling of the persistent enigma of the dead girl. Where Polanski concentrates on the gross horror of the broken body, and Trelkovsky's violent paranoia, at the expense of any lingering sadness of the suicide, Nurzynski gently conjures her pitiful presence like a haunting boudoir scent.
In Nurzynski's poetic version, as people begin to mistake Trelkovsky for the dead Simone we feel the chill of a passing ghost - the chill which is entirely missing from Polanski's overlong portrait of an inadequate and unlikeable man going mad.
Nurzynski is closer to the original story, whose title is 'Le Locataire chimérique' - a notion which Polanski and his writers have chosen to interpret in only it's monstrous aspect, and not in the more moving sense of a forlorn hope, an unfulfilled desire. The resultant personal tragedy that so headily drenches the atmosphere of the bereaved room, makes this incomparably the better film.
It keeps closer to the original, and does not dissipate it with pointless elaborations, nor injure it with Polanski's inexplicable omissions. Neither is the atmosphere of this French version spoiled by the tasteless intrusion of inappropriate black humour, nor the badly judged indulgence in ridiculous melodrama which Polanski's version suffers at the end. It is also infinitely improved by being in French, and not the jarring Yankee voices of the actors Polanski uses.
But certainly the greatest improvement on the 1976 version is the wonderfully androgynous presence of François De Brauer in the crucially ambiguous role of the new tenant: Polanski unwisely cast himself in this role, and made it ridiculous.
Marek Nurzynski, the otherwise unknown director of this film, is to be congratulated on his altogether more delicate handling of the persistent enigma of the dead girl. Where Polanski concentrates on the gross horror of the broken body, and Trelkovsky's violent paranoia, at the expense of any lingering sadness of the suicide, Nurzynski gently conjures her pitiful presence like a haunting boudoir scent.
In Nurzynski's poetic version, as people begin to mistake Trelkovsky for the dead Simone we feel the chill of a passing ghost - the chill which is entirely missing from Polanski's overlong portrait of an inadequate and unlikeable man going mad.
Nurzynski is closer to the original story, whose title is 'Le Locataire chimérique' - a notion which Polanski and his writers have chosen to interpret in only it's monstrous aspect, and not in the more moving sense of a forlorn hope, an unfulfilled desire. The resultant personal tragedy that so headily drenches the atmosphere of the bereaved room, makes this incomparably the better film.