Trelkovsky takes pride in being a French citizen, but as a Pole even in worldly Paris he is ever the Outsider.
At work, he’s a minor functionary disdained by the women and bullied by the brutish males. As we learn nothing else about him he’s a character unwittingly in search of an identity. Polanski plays him as a gentle, nice man — but lacking a firm core. He can counter his prospective landlord’s reluctance but not his office friends’ coarseness.
As if to try an identity on for size, he rents the apartment of a woman who tried to jump to her death. The room’s nine mirrors make it an instrument of self-reflection — were he confident in any self to reflect. Instead he draws into the suicide Simone’s life. He visits the comatose all-bandaged woman in the hospital, where he meets her friend Stella. They meet again at Simone’s funeral, then he joins her party in a bar.
Their possible affair starts with Stella’s erotic initiative at a Bruce Lee screening. A tryst in her apartment fizzles when Trelkovsky freezes on questioning his identity. Is he still himself when he has lost a tooth, when he has lost a limb, several limbs, his head? With that fixation he has begun to lose his self.
The gentle hero’s experience turns Kafkaesque when he thinks the other rooming house residents are conniving against him. Complaints of his noise continue beyond the justified. He becomes entangled in house politics when he declines to sign a petition against another tenant. When he’s robbed, the landlord, Monsieur Zy (evocative of Josef K?) persuades him not to report the theft, to save the house’s reputation and to avoid himself becoming known to the police. When Trelkovsky responds to a summons he finds they already have a file of complaints against him.
Now Trelkovsky suspects the community is trying to make him kill himself, as they perhaps did Simone. The conversion begins when the neighbourhood cafe brings him the morning hot chocolate that Simone always had. When he orders Galois they always bring him her Marboros, falsely claiming they have run out of his brand.
Essentially Trelkovsky is not just a tenant passing through a rented apartment but a man passing through another identity, the suicide’s. He privately dons makeup and Simone’s dress and dyes his hair her black. Feeding his sense of the unnatural, he espies other tenants using the communal toilet across from his window; they stand there blankly staring.
On an imagined trip to that toilet he looks across and sees himself spying on himself. A wall of Egyptian hieroglyphics would be left by the Egyptologist Simone herself, from the grave.
Trelkovsky’s paranoia ultimately destroys him. Finding salvation with Stella, the illusion of Monsieur Zy at the door drives Trelkovsky into mad destruction of her flat. Having lost his self he drifts into repeating Simone’s suicide, indeed doing it twice to properly “perform” her role as he assumes it.
Though Trelkovsky can’t save his own life he does save another’s. He patiently and generously consoles a man who has secretly loved Simone and has finally come to tell her that — only to have Trelkovsky report her astonishing suicide.
In our age of gender fluidity the film offers yet another possibility. The gentle Trelkovsky, sensitive, repelled by his office mates' aggressiveness, may rent the woman's apartment and be attracted to identifying with her as a way to express his own suppressed feminine nature. Hence his resistance to Stella's offer of a sexual relationship, especially when he retreats to speculate about the essence of his own identity. Fantasizing the other residents' determination to kill him may be his way of suppressing his female aspect. He blames them for driving him to kill the woman in him. Hence his double dive -- once as his male self, once as his female.
With writer/director Polanski also performing the lead role, the drama assumes another dimension. A writer like an immigrant moves through a new world with new people and a new life whenever he submits to his imagination. The danger is again abandoning his self and losing any hold on reality. The film’s opening shot is the view downward from the fatal apartment — the two suicides’ perspective. It’s a doom waiting to be seized, a story to be told and risk being stuck in.
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