I like a lot of French films but this one is dreadful. A lifeless, ugly, horribly miscast piece of tedia that has all the hallmarks of a first film - a first STUDENT film. Utterly lacking coherence or tension, it dawdles aimlessly between mystery and 'comedy' without ever achieving either. Scenes are choppy, dialogue is stilted and flashbacks are particularly irritating, denoted as they are by giving the lead actor a laughable haircut. However, he is unlikeable in any timeframe or tonsure. Quite apart from the dire content, the film looks as though it's been shot on tape by a bunch of refugees from a Human League video. Truly awful.

An uneasy, probably lightheaded young man, portrayed with the right anxious anchoring for us viewers by Vincent Cassel, has a chance encounter with the voice of his great love that abandoned him mysteriously two years ago; I say his voice because he overhears a conversation and then just sees his love from the behind running away. He has the good luck of finding her hotel room keys and embarks on the dangerous, mysterious journey of discovery interspersed with the flashbacks of his earlier amorous journey with that woman that explains his infatuation, builds up the mystery for us, is not without its whimsical french humor, and shows him as a lightheaded younger version of himself contrasting with his more respectable, as in lawyer, version, which displays no french revolution ponytail.This is a hard cocktail to pull through. The writer/director makes this half of the story a Hitchcockian pot-pouri that ranges from Vertigo (as Scotty gets on tracking down Madeleine so Max here follows the car in an almost copy paste manner, and we also have the scene in the flower shop repeated with the same color-range) to Rear Window (the theme of voyeurism) to North by Northwest (the theme of identity, mistaken, searching in a hotel for a ghost of a person), to name what was obvious for me.Then the film shifts gears into a different cinematic spectrum. What does an apartment have? Well, it has a tenant - and that is the synopsis of the film: from building up a hitchcockian mystery it delivers us to the grotesquerie of Polanski's half-psychological tales. That for me is unworkable; except for Repulsion, that is mainly for Deneuve's performance, I do not care much for Polanski's oeuvre: there is always something rancidly overworked in his films - so, when you pass form Hitchcock's imperturbable style to something self-conscious, this brings the house down. Even if Belucci's beauty lures us or we find her acting puffy and with a distant core, she still has underdeveloped her star radiance for her to truly matter; even if Cassell plays his antics with more insight maybe than the film allows and his comedy is spot-on and intuitive and makes one certain this works as a comedy only, even if it is close to a delirious, masochistic conception of cinema as joke on the director's part, it is mainly that shift in tone that makes the film flop and exposes its weaknesses: as a thriller it has too many improbabilities; as a comedy (watch how the music in the film works towards that direction: the opening credits are more pop and pun than a thriller would allow as the delicious, and one fears consciously cheesy and sarcastic repetition of Aznavour) has a too serious structure; it works best when one conceives it as rancid commentary on French connection, to put it that way. (It has the same analogous relation watermarked de Palma has with watermarked Rorty in the States around that time masking aversion to theory as pragmatism once more; as in France with the "nouveau philosophes" and their awkward rediscovery of Kantianism, the way the nineties rediscovered noir with neo-bourgeois results.)It may be interesting to see what the director/writer did as producer with the American remake of the film, but then again it may not be that interesting.PS Bohringer gives an almost powerhouse performance, but is constantly at odds with the film. This could have been superb, if one could be persuaded that she is elusive as any version of noir allows, the way the scenario handles her nevertheless makes her presence in the end irrelevant, which is all the more pitiful, irrelevant as a bad parable for french social security, I am tempted to say. As in the meantime I have discovered, Romane was named after Roman Polanski! Now tell me this has nothing to do with the film; it is as if Mimouni wanted to revive the french genre of roman (pun obliged!) a clef in cinematic terms, which turns him into a mad prankster, and explains the enigma of his hapax cinematic endeavor in a most unfavorable light.

This is a clever story about relationships and a display of three main categories of players in the game of relationships: playboys (Max), manipulative women (Alice) and the fools who may be indeed in love (Lisa, Muriel and Lucien).Max and Alice are very unlikeable and perhaps despicable characters but who are always in control in the game leaving their partners around in the dark. But as the profusely discussed ending tells us, as veteran players as Max and Alice were, they would be happy to part ways anytime they see fit as if the game was just announced to be over and each one of them could not care less to get on with his or her own life and play another game with some other anonymous people when another opportunity presented itself. Lisa, Muriel and Lucien might be the ones who felt like investing something real in a relationship, only not being able to realise that they were the baits in the game and the ultimate losers (as far as what we were shown is concerned....who knows if they are also advance players of some sort in their worlds not shown to us on screen).This is a very fast-paced, delicately crafted and seductively witty story with an enticing execution by the cast. It also deserves some deeper thinking: how much is real in a game of relationship?

When I watched L'Appartement with my girlfriend, she sighed: "How complicated!" And she is right, of course. When you are used to simple, one-linear plots, especially violent hero vs crook schemes, L'Appartement is hard to follow. A couple of the negative reviewers here also have missed one or more important points. Other whine about the confusing flash backs. Come on! This is not the kind of movie from which you can leave to visit the toilet, come back and get hooked again within a few seconds. This one demands full concentration and a keen eye on details. Then it is really not that hard to figure out what's happening and when. The director has left more than enough clues in all scenes.The first 3/4 of the movie centers about the question: why did Max and Lisa split? The film, as my girlfriend remarked, begins as a romantic lovestory, suggesting that two lost lovers will find each other again. Having experience with French movies, I predicted that the story pretty soon would get a sick twist and I was right. In the end of the first part it becomes clear, after many twists and turns, that Max and Lisa were manipulated by Alice. Max did not know, that Lisa had left and why. Lisa did not know, why Max did not contact her in Rome and left her without a trace, when she returned to Paris. The only one who did was Alice and she had her own reasons to keep her mouth shut.After both Max and Lisa have found out the truth, the question of course becomes: can Alice's manipulations be undone? Well, of course not, time has passed by and things have changed.Many European movies use a story telling technique I fully enjoy. There is no exposition of the basic conflict in the beginning, after which two (or more) interested parties try to decide in their own advantage. Instead the spectator is gradually fed with bits and pieces of the plot and hardly knows more than the main characters. L'Appartement is a fine and subtle example of this technique. In the first half Alice seems to be a side character; slowly it becomes clear, that she is key figure.Acting is simply great. Vincent Cassel is perfect as the somewhat naive and impulsive character, who risks a secured life just to hunt a dream from the past. Monica Belucci is very beautiful of course, but also competent. Jean Paul Ecoffey provides the necessary comical touch. Romane Bohringer is very convincing as the neurotic woman, plagued by feelings of guilt and regret.The only reason I did not gave it a 10 is the somewhat unsatisfying end. Of course it was necessary because of the desired symmetry. After all the events Max is exactly on the point where the movie begun, only wiser and sadder. Alice has paid for her sins. But still the little twists on the airport are a bit artificial. Max too easily exchanges Lisa for Alice; Alice too easily decides to reject Max, who has been her dream for so long; Max too easily returns to his fiancée. But then again, I don't know how how this could be achieved without sacrificing the elegant symmetry. I guess sometimes artists have to give up realism for beauty.