What I find interesting is that I didn’t see a drastic change in either neighborhood throughout the movie. However, what I did see is Elgar’s determination to make change during the movie. It’s not the stereotypical change that you usually see in a movie about segregation; in fact, the movie is less about segregation and more about culture differences.
When Elgar takes on the challenge of remodeling the building, I think his intentions are good. He wants to improve the living environment for the tenants and also invest in his new piece of real estate. As someone who’s interested in interior design, I was excited to see the final product of the building. I noticed that in this decade, the way to upgrade a room was to just paint everything white. It’s almost like rubbing off the “purity” of white people in other neighborhoods. However, what disappointed me most and what ends up as a huge message of The Landlord is the fact that the building never gets redone. The gentrification attempt turns out to be a disaster.
The scene that stands out to me is the scene where Mrs. Enders comes to the tenement house and has quite a time with Marge. This one stood out to me for many reasons! I’m even excited to hit all the points that I want to make! At first, I was pleased to see that she brought the fabric for the new drapes, but as we all know, the drapes are not what took up most of her time there. So once I realized that the drape session turned into a mingling session, I was interested to see how Mrs. Enders develops a new understanding of blacks. In the frame where Mrs. Enders is lying on the table and Marge is sitting next to her, the lighting accents her white dress and hides Marge in the darkness next to her. At this point, I realized that the separation was still there. And when Mrs. Enders leaves without having made any progress on the drapes, I realized that the house probably wasn’t going to go through the transformation I thought it would.
By the time Elgar leaves the tenement, he removes himself and his belongings but a part of him has been left inside Fanny.
