Verdict
Summary
The sexy labyrinthine mystery / thriller The Apartment from filmmaker Gilles Mimouni keeps unfolding its mysteries right up until the last moment like a good Hitchcock film. I could never get comfortable within its telling because as soon as you think you know where it’s headed, it takes another twist and goes somewhere else. Very much in the vein of a Brian De Palma picture, this one should appeal to fans of erotic thrillers as much as romantic dramas.
Plot:
A man obsessed with a woman finds that there’s a woman obsessed with him.
Review:
Max (Vincent Cassel) is going to ask a woman to marry him after he returns from a business trip to Tokyo, but on the very day he’s set to leave, he thinks he gets a glimpse of a woman he was madly in love with to the point of obsession in a phone booth. The woman he thinks he sees is Lisa (Monica Bellucci), the one who got away from him two years ago right when he thought they were getting serious about each other. We see the backstory: Max saw her in passing for the first time on the street one day, and he stalked her every day and night until it became obvious that he could no longer conceal himself, and she made the first move to “out” him, but it’s almost a “meet cute” moment, and she opens the door for him to actually ask her out on a date. That led to a relationship, but she always had the upper hand and never gave him more than the occasional signal that she cared much for him at all. Flash forward to the present: Max drops everything when he thinks he sees her again in passing, and forgets all about his trip to Tokyo, his luggage, his potential fiancé, and his life. He spends the next few days obsessively tracking down Lisa’s breadcrumbs, leading to strange encounters with other men who might also be stalking her, as well as breaking into the apartment that he thinks is hers, but he finds another woman there, a woman claiming to be Lisa. This woman is Alice (Romane Bohringer), who we find out has spent years obsessing over him and setting the stage for him to walk into her life, and because the moment is right, Max sleeps with her. Also in the mix is Max’s best friend Lucien (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) who is in love with a mysterious actress, who happens to be Alice, but with her dual identity as the Lisa Max has just slept with, he has no idea the heartbreak he’s in for when he finds out who his lover truly is. But the mystery unfolds as the real Lisa enters the picture again, but with Alice/Lisa screwing around with lies and deceptions, how will Max ever find his way to her?
The sexy labyrinthine mystery / thriller The Apartment from filmmaker Gilles Mimouni keeps unfolding its mysteries right up until the last moment like a good Hitchcock film. I could never get comfortable within its telling because as soon as you think you know where it’s headed, it takes another twist and goes somewhere else. It casts Cassel as a stalker whose motivations are easy to read, but it’s the women in the movie who really upend your expectations and keep you guessing. While we think Bellucci is the object of obsession here, it’s in fact Cassel who is the true object of obsession for Bohringer’s complicated character. The movie ends up being her story, which is a real humdinger if you think about it. Very much in the vein of a Brian De Palma picture, this one should appeal to fans of erotic thrillers as much as romantic dramas. It was remade in English as Wicker Park with Josh Hartnett and Diane Kruger. The score to The Apartment is by Peter Chase, and I can almost guarantee that it was temp-tracked to Jerry Goldsmith’s Basic Instinct.
Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray of The Apartment comes in a nice crisp high definition transfer, and bonus features include an audio commentary by a film historian, and the trailer.
