Despite sharing a title with an all-time Hollywood classic, this 1996 French production has no other similarities to the Jack Lemmon/Shirley MacLaine charmer. Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci star in writer/director Gilles Mimouni’s BAFTA-winning romantic thriller about a lovelorn man who believes he has rediscovered his long lost love, abandoning his fiancée and his job duties in his quest to track her down. This is the film where Cassel and Bellucci first met and fell in love in real life, making their scenes together feel so wholly authentic that we almost feel like we’re intruding in their blossoming romance.
Buy The Apartment (1996) Blu-rayMimouni cuts between Max and Lisa’s past relationship and their current estrangement as he slowly doles out backstory to add substance to Max’s present infatuation. It’s extraordinarily easy to understand Max’s all-consuming attraction, with Bellucci absolutely ethereal in her early 30s, even though her mysterious character doesn’t seem to have much depth. The plot progresses as expected until the middle of the film, when Max’s current fiancée (Romane Bohringer) emerges as a conniving villain who has been actively working to keep them apart for years, leading to her escalating series of increasingly unbelievable mind games designed to give her the future she desires.
Even with this unwelcome Fatal Attraction-esque development, Mimouni could have kept the story fairly on track to arrive at a reasonable resolution, but instead he places Max at a pivotal crossroads where Max makes a choice so ridiculously out of character that the film loses all credibility. It’s a highly unsatisfying final act, making the story hard to recommend. However, the palpable passion between Cassel and Bellucci is so overwhelming that the film remains a masterclass in capturing lightning in a bottle, a testament to the power of fortuitous casting to rescue an otherwise middling project.
The Blu-ray is presented in the film’s original 1.66:1 aspect ratio, with DTS 2.0 stereo sound. It doesn’t appear to have gone through any significant restoration, but the print is mostly clean and the cinematography is above average. Bonus features are an audio commentary track by a film historian, and the original trailer.
The Apartment is available on Blu-ray on Tuesday, August 20th. While it has some decent twists, they ultimately seem too contrived and unbelievable to hold up to much scrutiny. Only the intense early chemistry of Cassel and Bellucci have stood the test of time, making the film still worth a watch. If you ever wondered how they ended up together for so long, this film goes a long way to answering the question.
