NEW PRINT/SATIRE
THE APARTMENT
(PG) 125min .0000
Billy Wilder’s corrosive 1960 lampoon of corporate America is now so familiar to most people that it barely seems to deserve the time investment that this new print demands. Look again, though, and there is plenty of really surprising stuff in this wonderful film.
If you have never seen this film before it tells the story of spineless insurance statistician CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) who works in a huge, busy insurance office in New York. He has fallen into the practice of leasing his apartment to his superiors for illicit liaisons and is rewarded with high-speed promotion. All of which suits him fine until he realises one of the girl’s being taken back to his apartment is elevator operator Fran (Shirley MacLaine), the girl of his dreams.
It’s easy to forget just how amoral, raunchy, rude and cruel IAL Diamond’s acidic script must have been back
52 THE LIST 3—1 7 Jul 2008
at the tail end of the jet age. Diamond and Wilder lay it all to waste, from cronyism to the insidiousness of the then relatively new medium of television, they tear down the post war urban American dream and leave it to soak up rainwater and fag butts in the gutter. Look at central suicide recovery sequence of the film. Shot entirely in silence it follows the drawn out attempts of Baxter’s Jewish doctor neighbour Dr Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) to keep Fran alive after an attempted suicide. It’s a black hole from which the film only just about recovers by the end.
The truth is Wilder never wanted anyone to come out of his movies feeling comfortable or complacent. His lack of faith in humanity meant that even from this remove his films can seem incredibly modern in their refusal to betray sympathy or award moral marks. Now, as then, The Apartment is a great movie - just go watch it, again. (Paul Dale)
I Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 7 i—Thu 77 Jul. GFT, Glasgow from Sun 7 7—Wed 20 Aug.
COMEDY, ROMANCE MES AMIS, MES AMOURS (15) 106min 00
I Selected release from Fri 4 Jul.
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Mes Amis, Mes Amours resembles a Gallic version of a Richard Curtis movie. set in an affluent. quarter of London and peopled by French expats: it's less a romantic comedy than a sentimental fantasy of city living among an ultra-friendly community of shopkeepers and bistro-owners. Two middle-aged pals who are both divorced, architect Antoine (Pascal Elbe) and bookshop-owner Mathias (Vincent London). decide to live together with their young children under the same roof. Naturally the grown-ups are temperamentally unsuited to being housemates — Antoine is fanatically tidy and draws up lists of rules, while Mathias is cheerfully disorganised and impulsive. The domestic arrangements are further complicated by Mathias falling for beautiful TV journalist Audrey (Virginie Ledoyen) who wanders into his shop one day looking for 18th century French literature.
Working from her brother Marc‘s best—selling novel, director Lorraine Levy elicits amiable performances from her cast. but the visual and verbal gags reap precious few dividends. and she appears only to be able to conceive of London in picture- postcard terms. Meanwhile. the closeness of Antoine's and Mathias's relationship leads both characters to worry about being mistaken for a gay couple. and it's hard not to read the cursorin handled romance between Mathias and the much younger Audrey as a textbook example of displaced desire. (Tom Dawson)