Roman Polanski definitely has a Rear Window fetish, but this is not to say that he's big on voyeurism. After a triple-bill of Polanski's The Tenant, Bitter Moon, and Death and the Maiden, one decides that what his characters peer out at from their apartment portholes is far more important than the fact of their doing it, the only wrench in this conclusion the opening minutes of Death and the Maiden, in which the protagonist is introduced to us through the casements of her seaside home as she prepares an abortive supper for two. (Polanski may have thought it the most efficient way to introduce her paranoia--by proving she can be watched.) Even in the recent The Pianist, for which Polanski won his first Best Director Oscar, a family of Jews has their fate spelled out for them when the view from their terrace is spoiled by an incident of Nazi terror. For Polanski, you look out the window to learn about your place in the world, not to get off on the spy.

In The Tenant, for example, it's not quite clear to the title occupant, Trelkovsky (Polanski), nor we his spectators, that he has gone insane until he gazes out at the courtyard and it morphs, in a gradually unnerving 360-degree pan, into a theatre, with the other tenants perched on velvet-lined balconies wielding opera goggles, all the better to observe Trelkovsky's disintegration. In Bitter Moon, the narrator (Peter Coyote) becomes obsessed with the rose-tinted Paris nightlife outside his window as his relationship with live-in girlfriend Mimi (Polanski's real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner) loses its charge. And in Death and the Maiden, Mr. and Mrs. Escobar (Stuart Wilson and Sigourney Weaver) have isolated themselves off the coast of nowhere, their vista a rocky road that appears to end at a clifftop; Death and the Maiden is based on an Ariel Dorfman play, and the nothingness that surrounds the Escobar place reflects the minimalism of Dorfman's stage directions, which rely more heavily on sound cues than on sets. But it also illustrates Polanski's knack for engulfing his characters in their projections: Mrs. Escobar lives in a mental black hole, her past unresolved, her future uncertain.

In what one can only presume is cinema imitating life, Trelkovsky is victimized by self-pity; I wouldn't go so far as to say the film is an apologia (unlike Death and the Maiden), but it has definite aspects. That The Tenant's existential inquiries aren't especially acute--there is the small matter of Trelkovsky losing it too soon, à la Jack Nicholson in The Shining--transforms them into tokens of angst: Polanski instils a Cartesian nightmare with moral weight by focusing on its emotional toll. The film is maybe the most personal (Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers--indebted to The Tenant's tragic ending for its own parting shot--the most doomsday) of those linked, however tentatively, to the post-Watergate feeling of paranoia, though it tries too hard to resonate with the American of the mid-'70s through a permanent dub that denies The Tenant a sense of exoticism, international cinema's prerogative. (Polanski and non-French cast members Melvyn Douglas (as Trelkovsky's landlord) and Shelly Winters (as the concierge) are among the few to speak in their God-given voices.) Perhaps in thematic step with the film, Isabelle Adjani's persona undergoes a metamorphosis from the simple act of her English looping: once and always a willowy Francophone starlet, here she's a bohemian precursor to Annie Hall; Adjani's performance is the only one that could be said to benefit from the post-synch.

Just as FILM FREAK CENTRAL's own Travis Hoover wrote of John Malkovich's The Dancer Upstairs, one of Death and the Maiden's failings--lone failings, as it happens--is a refusal to localize itself, choosing instead the tired ambiguity "A country in Latin America," as though below the equator lies a cultural blob. (Playwright Dorfman, a refugee of Argentina, has hinted that Chilé inspired the unnamed backdrop.) Nevertheless, it hardly matters, since the film version has little to do with foreign policy and everything to do with Roman Polanski, lending a determinedly incognito piece a much-needed disposition. Weaver pinch-hits for Samantha Geimer--whom Polanski purportedly drugged and raped when she was 13 (Weaver's Paulina Escobar, née Lorca, was abducted as a college student by the secret police and subsequently violated under sedation)--and Ben Kingsley (as Paulina's would-be torturer, Dr. Roberto Miranda) for Polanski himself. Though Polanski's attraction to the material is not limited to autobiographical parallels (there are notions of fate and circumstance in keeping with his overriding motifs), they are impossible to ignore.

One rainy evening, Paulina's husband Gerardo, a lawyer who's just been appointed to head the President's commission on the transgressions of the previous regime, hitches a ride home from Dr. Miranda, the man Paulina will come to believe--from the familiarity of his laugh and pet phrases, from the tape of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" sitting in his car (which she surreptitiously drives off a cliff)--was her torturer all those years ago. Holding Miranda at gunpoint while declaring Gerardo his attorney (and while expecting Gerardo's personal allegiance regardless), Paulina puts her hostage in the Prisoner's Dilemma: if he did or didn't do it, if he does or doesn't confess, there are absolutely no certainties to his outcome. While Polanski falls into the trap of exhibiting greater sympathy for the men, an all but inevitable by-product of Paulina having less screen-time (where in the theatre, she could stand on stage for the sake of audience identification even if she had nothing to say, a complex series of justifications precedes cutting to her silent stare on film), Death in the Maiden ultimately takes no sides, its ending implicating the true culprit--the inherently quenchless desire for "closure"--from every conceivable angle. I find it at once caustic and sincere.

Paramount's The Tenant and New Line's Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden DVDs are of proportional quality. With each disc presenting its respective film in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, The Tenant looks fresher than ever despite the occasional scuffmark, though only Death and the Maiden could be mistaken for a film of current vintage. Edge-enhancement and other authoring deficiencies are a consistent non-issue. The Tenant's 2.0 mono track is for whatever reason less shrill than Death and the Maiden's 2.0 stereo mix, but Bitter Moon has both beat with a Dolby Surround soundtrack of smooth fidelity and strong bass. The Tenant includes the film's Hitchcockian trailer; the Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden platters feature ROM-enabled weblinks and trailers for Bitter Moon, Death and the Maiden, Invincible, The Sleeping Dictionary, and Invisible Circus.-Bill Chambers

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