Strip away The Tenant's narrative and there is Roman Polanski himself, watching the child he never got to father because his pregnant wife was murdered by the Manson gang. Tenderness gives way to indignation—why should this filthy little brat have lived instead of his own child? Or consider the Polanski who escaped from the Krakow ghetto, his survivor's guilt enhanced by the death of his sister and pregnant mother in Nazi gas chambers, slapping the face of a filthy little brat who dares to whine about a toy boat. (I realize this last reading seems a bit of a stretch, even mawkish—until you notice the Stars of David formed by the legs of the folding chairs in the park and wonder how they could've been accidental.)
Because of what we know and think we know, it's never easy to find the line between the artist and his work. Because there is no such line. Because the Polanski who made so many titanic works of cinema is the same Polanski who escaped from the Nazis is the same Polanski who not only lost his wife and unborn child to the Mansons but was initially accused of the murders in the press is the same Polanski who gave a 13-year-old girl champagne and a quaalude fragment then had sex with her on the floor of Jack Nicholson's living room. If the 20th century happened to anyone, it happened to Roman Polanski. And as a new documentary shows, it's still happening to him.