Movie Review SSJ

The 82nd Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film – “The New Tenant” uses twenty minutes and two story lines – one light and one dark – to reveal for us layer by layer the romantic, absurd and tragic story lurking in a small apartment building The film’s plot is intriguing.

       The plot of the film is very intriguing, usually not too rigorous logical thinking of people, to figure out all the details of small and large, I’m afraid you have to brush three brushes. The main characters in the film are a gay couple (Frank, Peter), just moved into a new home, they lent the flour left behind in the cupboard to the old lady (grandma) to bake a cake. Suddenly, the family breaks into the home of an out-of-control man (Jan), confused protagonists just calmed him, but the man was the second intruder – drug dealers (Zelko) a gunshot put down. It turns out the flour was drugs. Zelko, the owner of the drugs, is furious and shoots the old lady who comes to question him. Unexpectedly, the drug dealer is put down by the old lady’s granddaughter (Irene). In the end, Irene dies from the drug cake, while the two poor protagonists run out into the street and dance. This is the sequence that the camera shows us, with the two protagonists being both narrators and outsiders, while one incident after another is like a candy cane, self-contained and strung together in the protagonists’ apartment. The film’s clues are thrown out in abundance in the dialogue, and in the end, we are able to restore the hidden events to their original form.

       In the midst of this, there is a romance that is not without romance. The man who bursts into the protagonist’s room in a rage, Jan, who looks like a tiger with a back and a flesh, is in fact delicately in love with his wife Irene, and we learn from him that he knows her preferences and wishes. He once took his wife to a concert in Vienna and ended up making jokes because of the wrong band she liked. However, we also learn that Irene is a drug addict who often comes to this apartment, the previous owner of Peter and Frank’s house, to do drugs, and Irene even snatches the drugs that the cat vomits up. Unable to accept his wife’s degradation through drug addiction, Jan and Irene eventually divorced. The old lady didn’t want to see her granddaughter’s happiness ruined, so she arranged this day specifically to try to reunite the two. She borrows flour from the new tenant downstairs, but as fate would have it, the flour Peter so kindly lent her turns out to be drugs. The old lady, who wanted to make her granddaughter her favorite cinnamon cake, inadvertently poisons her favorite granddaughter to death. At the same time, Jan, who wanted to settle a score with his wife, was also killed by Zelko, who came to retrieve the drugs. Later, the angry old lady is also killed by Zelko. Peter and Frank, who had made a sloppy mistake, were also going to die, but Irene, who was dying, came downstairs (perhaps because she often took drugs here, so she had a reflex to go downstairs after eating the poisoned cake) and killed Zelko with a stick. Her hallucinations include a palace in Vienna, a glass-eyed deer… everything that is pure and beautiful. This degenerate addict, in fact, still retains the heart of a child. She longed for beauty like a little girl, and her inner self was actually crystal clear. But it was too late. All Irene could do was to say hello to her loved ones before she died. Immediately, her life is gone, and the whole room is filled with victims of this senseless tragedy. The plot is intertwined, requiring the audience to reason out what happened on their own based on clues.

       If the plot is carefully laid out to show a theme, then the main characters of the film – Peter and Frank, the outsiders of this tragedy – their experience reveals this theme. At the beginning of the film, Frank makes his chattering persona abundantly clear. He went from terrorist attacks to environmental pollution, endlessly complaining about the bad world. Peter seems to be the opposite of him, he is a friendly, peaceful smoke-free, is a master of health and wellness. One of them is pessimistic and misanthropic, believing that the world is hopeless, always fighting with shortcomings; the other pursues perfection, believing that life should be healthy and positive, to moderate bad desires. However, when the real death is imminent, when the bizarre farce is staged one after another, when the weird absurdity is suddenly trailing across, they are surprised, enlightened and relieved. It turns out that life is so fragile, death is so unpredictable, living is such a great gift.

       A person can die with all the pomp and circumstance, with long ceremonies, crystal coffins, gold silk life jacket, as much as possible to create a sense of ritual, but death is death, death takes away only your soul, not your gold. What’s more, this room full of the wasted – Jan, Irene, Zelko and grandma – also have no time to care about the appearance of death. So, don’t listen to the sound of the leaves hitting the forest, why not whistle and walk slowly! A breath of life is still alive, why not smoke and drink, poetry and music?

       So at the end of the film, Peter and Frank danced with love, love of life, disdain for oppression, and rebuke of suffering. They have just discovered the beauty of life, so they can’t wait to embrace life. So, what about you in front of the screen?

       In my opinion, the director is using seemingly absurd techniques to throw out a philosophical question – both the understanding of death, which happens to be a topic we always avoid talking about. The director gives his answer to this question, which of course requires further reflection on our part. At the same time, he issues a sincere invitation – both on behalf of life, inviting you to enjoy it solemnly and solemnly from now on.

       Before death, the door is always open, do you want to become a new tenant?