E-Mail This Article to a Friend Roman knows The Tenant at the HFA, plus Jour de fête BY GERALD PEARY

Roman Polanski, the bad-boy fugitive, turns 70 this August, and what a distinguished directorial career, from his precocious student shorts in the 1950s at the Lódz Film School in Poland to last year’s multiple Oscar winner, The Pianist. Few first features can match the perverse brilliance of Knife in the Water (1962).

Then Polanski came West. You can’t get more frightening than Repulsion (1965), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968); and Chinatown (1974), everyone agrees, is the seminal example of neo-noir. There are Polanski’s two great, inexplicably forgotten works: Cul-de-sac (1966), cinema’s closest analogue to the theater of the absurd, and Tess (1979), a masterly adaptation of Thomas Hardy. And there’s a Polanski underground "cult" favorite, The Tenant (1976) which, after scathing original reviews, survived to become a video-store hit. It comes to the Harvard Film Archive next Thursday and Friday, July 24 and 25, in a rare 35mm showing, as part of the "Cinema A-Z" program of prints from the HFA vaults.

A macabre short novel by French cartoonist Roland Topor, The Tenant was purchased for development by Paramount Pictures. Polanski petitioned Paramount executive Barry Diller to let him write and direct. He knew the book, and it was manifestly his kind of story. A meek bank clerk rents an apartment in a moldy Paris building filled with perhaps-Satanic weirdos — shades of Rosemary’s Baby! The clerk, isolated and paranoid, has demonic images swirl before his eyes, like the phantoms plaguing Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.

Polanski himself plays Trelkovsky, the Kafka-esque cog of a protagonist. For the Paris shoot, he imported Hollywood veterans whom he cast in inspired ways as odd-acting inhabitants of the offputting apartment building: Shelley Winters as the hostile concierge, Melvyn Douglas as the testy landlord, Jo Van Fleet as a spiteful neighbor. Stella, Trelkovsky’s love interest, was played by rising French star Isabelle Adjani (L’histoire d’Adèle H.). With oversized tinted glasses, demonstrative hair, thigh-high boots and a mini-skirt, the deglamorized Adjani resembled the 1970s Gloria Steinem!

As for the story, Trelkovsky discovers that Simone, the previous tenant of his no-frill, no-toilet flat, had leapt out the window in a suicide attempt. He’s drawn to the hospital, where he finds the grotesque, dying woman wrapped up like a mummy and howling into the air. At the bedside he meets Stella, and in starts and stops, they have a clumsy affair. Meanwhile, the apartment building proves stultifying. If Trelkovsky makes any type of noise, people bang angrily on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. He looks across his courtyard into windows and sees ghostly forms. Slowly, he decides that poor Simone was pushed out of the window by the evil neighbors. They have similar plans, he believes, for his demise.

For most of his film, Polanski follows the trajectory of Topor’s novel, and both versions of the story are haunting and deliciously atmospheric. (Polanski benefits from the somber, hour-of-the-wolf cinematography by Ingmar Bergman’s great cameraman, Sven Nykvist.) But the last act of the book is problematic: Trelkovsky starts painting his nails and donning Simone’s clothes, which he’s found in a closet. It’s not very clear why he’s becoming, by transference, the ex-tenant; and Polanski’s sudden appearance in high drag seems even less motivated. It’s too easy to hypothesize that Trelkovsky is turning schizoid.

In his 1984 autobiography, Roman, Polanski put his finger on the problem: "With hindsight, I realize that Trelkovsky’s insanity doesn’t build gradually enough — that his hallucinations are too startling and unexpected." There’s a heavy-handed convergence of expressionism and surrealism; even so, The Tenant remains a treat.

Jour de fête (1948), at the HFA this Friday and Saturday, July 18 and 19, is the first feature by the French comedy director/writer/actor Jacques Tati (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Playtime), and it’s a pleasant, modest, Renoir-spirited apprentice work. A mini county fair arrives by truck in a French village, sets up a merry-go-round, shows movies in a tent, then departs. Tati plays the bike-riding local postman who gets derailed from his leisurely life by a documentary at the fair showing US postal workers delivering the mail on motorcycles and by helicopter. For a while, the Frenchman madly races his bike, seduced by the images of speedy, crazed Americans showing off their might. But in the end, slow and easy wins the day, as Tati, on foot, helps his Gallic community harvest their hay.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com