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List Price: $9.98 | | Label: Lions Gate
Salesrank: 16333
Released: August 22, 2006 |
| Our Price: $4.89 |
| Used Price: $4.96 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Max, a young corporate hotshot, leaves his successful new world behind to search for his elusive lost love Lisa. His mad quest begins after he accidentally overhears Lisa's melodic voice speaking in the phone booth next door. But before he knows it, she is gone. Still, he is so elated that he abandons his plans, lies to his fiancee, and after leaving his luggage with his pal Lucien, sets off to find her. The hunt leads to a fabulous apartment, where he saves a girl from a suicide thinking that she is Lisa. But this girl, Alice is as drab and mousy as Max's Lisa is beautifully feline. Max becomes involved with Alice, unaware that she also dates Lucien.Meanwhile the real Lisa attempts to break free from her obsessive rich lover who may have murdered his wife. For this reason, she continues to avoid her apartment, which she has generously loaned to Alice. When these characters collide, the stage is set for a tragic denouement.
The Apartment Reviews:
Vincent Cassel Was Quite A Leading Man Discovery 
2009-09-24 - One facet of this movie that no one mentions but it really is a factor is that two of the actors on the screen are perhaps the sexiest, most magnetic and charismatic stars movie goers have seen in awhile. These two are Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci. They made the movie in 1996 and actually married one another in 1999. IMDB lists them as still married. So perhaps the film was helped by this real life sizzling and chemistry. It is difficult to shoot a film involving love, attraction and sexuality if the two actors are absolutely flat with no chemistry between them. This French film involves them as former lovers who cannot find one another again. He does spot her one day and follows her to her apartment. However, when he hides in her apartment, he discovers it is someone who looks like her who lives there. But he was sure he saw her, not this other woman. This is a very nuanced, layered film. Cassel is definitely the lead because the camera is always on him and he is the one who is searching. Just writing about it, I feel another watching coming on! Some have compared this to Hitchcock and De Palma and it is a fair comparison. Truffaut was another Frenchman who paid homage to Hitchcock with THE BRIDE WORE BLACK. This film is like that one in style, elan and suspense.
Nice to see Bellucci and Cassel together, but The Apartment is complex viewing 
2009-09-20 - This is the film that made the quadra-lingal Monica Bellucci a star; plus it's the one that introduced her to now-husband, Vincent Cassel. Bellucci is - if possible - de-glamorized here most of the time. She wears a backpack! And pants! And athletic shoes! Such are the pressures when you are Monica Bellucci. To see she and Cassel together at the starts of their now famous careers is a treat.
The movie itself is tortuously complex and riven with holes, most notably: Cassel's Max (rising corporate hotshot and fixer) is tasked with flying to Tokyo to swing some major deal. But he [THINKS HE] overhears Bellucci's Lisa - his erstwhile lover and one-time _almost_ live-in mate - in a happenstance semi-encounter and becomes frantic to track her down. So, what to do? He pretends to wing it to Tokyo, goes out the backdoor of the airport (passing the fiancée, Muriel, who dropped him in the process), calls the high-profile clients in Tokyo telling them he's been unavoidably detained, and makes calls from Paris to Muriel pretending he's in Tokyo. Muriel is, by the way, Max's CEO's sister...but no big deal to the director: nothing ever really becomes of all this. Huh? In real life, Max's ruse would be found out in a day, and the film's entire premise shot. But, whatever, right? It annoyed me that something that blatant would essentially pass unnoticed.
The movie's second-half turns into a head-spinning roundelay between Lisa, Max, Lisa's spurned friend Alice (or is she Lisa?) and Max's friend Lucien. Despite the complexities and bulldozer-sized plot holes, The Apartment still made for 2 hours of enjoyable watching. Writer/Director Gilles Mimouni (Wicker Park) employs a really neat trick of showing you an event from a character's point-of-view, then revealing, say, 40 minutes more of the story, and then showing you the event again from another character's point of view...by which time the quizzical first-time showing has new meaning and gives you an 'ah ha!' moment. It's very carefully constructed and artful stuff.
Great Seller...really
2009-09-11 - Great seller, Shipped and arrived on time as described, doing business was a pleasure and I dont say this just because...I say it because you are a great person to buy from.
confused and pointless
2009-08-22 - The main thing this film has going for it is the young, and very beautiful, Vincent Cassel. Pretty much everything he does is interesting. But he couldn't save this confused, and confusing, drivel. It pretends to be important and artful but, alas, is neither.
To be fair, the film has some style, but none of the characters comes across as more than superficial, deceitful, given to inexplicable flights of fancy in the name of -- you guessed it -- love. They have some good shags, but that's about it. Nothing too eternal for all their pretenses, feigned nervousness, and ineptitude.
I watched, and fidgeted, all the way to the end just to see if the story was actually going anywhere ultimately. It wasn't.
The only thing that could have saved this film would have been for muscular Vincent Cassel to take off his shirt a lot more. A LOT. Then it would have been Academy material. His character may not be too bright, but he's a genius from the neck down.
Not much of a bargain 
2009-03-12 - I'd been kind of hemming and hawing for years about whether to pick up the French DVD of this; it's been out of print for a while and it's a little pricey. Somehow I missed the news that this had finally gotten a DVD release in the U.S., so when I stumbled on it in a store for about $10 I snatched it up without a second thought. That'll show me.
The transfer is not so hot, as others have said. The movie sort of looks as though it's been shot using diffusion filters, but in actual fact there are other DVD releases of this movie that have plenty of detail and sharpness, so something seems to be off here. It's not the worst-looking or -sounding DVD version of this movie out there, but it's far from the best.
What really drove me up the wall, though, were the English subtitles. I don't know if it's a Lionsgate thing or what, but this is the second foreign-language film of theirs I've gotten that has something wonky in that department. Their 'High Tension' DVD had subtitles that matched the dubbed dialogue instead of the French, and 'The Apartment' has a hearing-impaired subtitle track as the only option. Not only do you get the dialogue translated for you, but (English) song lyrics and prominent sound effects are described in text. Subtitles like this are a great option to have if you need them, but if you don't it gets maddening to see "[knock on door]," "[clatter]," "[car engine starts]" and every other thing you can imagine popping up onscreen every couple of minutes. I'll just be doing what I should have done in the first place and picking up the French disc.
