The Apartment

This is an astonishing film: a romantic thriller with a convoluted but perfectly constructed and devastatingly symmetrical plot, brilliantly buttressed by the use of recurring visual motifs. Everything in it is beautifully filmed: the women, the apartments; but more amazing is the devastating juxtapositioning of images, almost every scene has echoes of another. This is a story told in light, in colour, in many almost-parallels. Every time I watch it, it fills me with delight.

The acting is great too. Romane Bohringer is stunning as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown: everything about her changes with her mood. Vincent Cassel plays a very different role to his part in La Haine; but no less excellently: shifty and sympathetic at the same time. And Monica Bellucci - ah!, Monica Bellucci, well, put simply, she plays (is?) the world's most perfect woman. There's one small scene about three quarters of the way through where she does nothing more than smile; yet in that instant, says more than hours of Hollywood junk.

One cannot do justice to this film without at least mentioning the superb, sequential climax: sad, shocking, ironic and subtle in turn. But if one moment captures the brilliance of this work, it's the scene at the start of this fabulous denouement, the prospect of which has been teasingly laid before us throughout the entire story. Yet when the moment comes, it is handled so delicately, so briefly, so deftly, that on reflection it makes you gasp. Only a director of staggering confidence would dare to underplay this vital point. But the confidence is justified. Cinema doesn't come much better than this.

A wonderful story about the consequences of obsessive love with the beautiful romantic back streets of Paris as its location. We're transported through time and see the plot develop from the perspectives of the three main characters as the mystery unwinds.

Forget the recent dire American remake which sadly tarnished the reputation of the French original by virtue of the director's involvement in both. This is a deftly- drawn romantic 90s noir with many twists and turns. It works best as a Gallic ode to Hitchcock's Rear Window, because the notion of voyeurism is the constant theme that fires the intricate screenplay. The story is stunningly realized, like a Picasso painting, offering multi-perspectives on the same event and demanding the viewer's participation throughout. The settings, music and haunting score are wonderful as well as the excellent contributions from the cast. Watch it more than once.

"L'appartement" has to be among the best French films I have ever seen (along with "Hatred", also starring Vincent Cassel, and those great Gerard Dépardieu/Pierre Richard movies). Cassel and Bellucci are amazing in the leading roles. Aside from "Brotherhood Of The Wolves" and "Dobermann" I have not yet seen a bad movie with this couple. "L'appartement" sucks you in from the beginning and the twists and turns keep you thrilled until the very end. Fragment storytelling really hasn't worked this well since "Pulp Fiction". Let's just hope there won't be a godawful American remake of this unique romance/mystery-thriller. (EDIT: Guess what! A godawful American remake has been made!)!

Stylish, erotic and complex, Gilles Mimouni's only film to date appears at first sight to be quintessentially French, but has links to American identity-themed, noirish thrillers, such as Preminger's Laura and Hitchcock's Vertigo. (I'm also not so sure as other postings that all the locations and interiors are actually Parisian; the credits indicate that a lot of the movie was made in Spain.)

Max (Vincent Cassel) is a successful, young executive, engaged to be married, who catches a fleeting glimpse of an ex-lover, Lisa (Monica Bellucci), and immediately drops plans to travel to Tokyo, in order to find her. But, instead, he finds another woman (Romane Bohringer), bearing a resemblance to Lisa, with whom he starts an affair, while still hoping to find Lisa.

The story is told in an extremely fragmented manner, jumping backwards and forwards in time, with hair-style, clothing and sometimes weather providing clues to the sequence of events. By the end of the film almost every i has been dotted, and t crossed, so that theoretically it should be possible to re-edit the movie so that it is linear. But as well as being a duller movie, this would lose what I see as one of its main themes - that memories, fuelled by imagination, can be more powerful than mundane reality. Another theme seems to be that not everybody gets what they deserve, and life can be cruel. Generally, I see the film as being bleaker and more amoral than do some IMDb postings.

The acting, camerawork, sets, music and, of course, the editing are all first rate. This is a perfect film to rent, so that baffling bits (or all) of it can be replayed.