APARTMENT ZERO
With Colin Firth, Hart Bochner, Dora Bryan, Liz Smith, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, James Telfer, Mirella D’Angelo, Juan Vitali, and Francesca d’Aloja.
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Visibly influenced by Roman Polanski (The Tenant) and Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train and Psycho), and marked by strong parallels with Claude Chabrol (Les cousins) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema), this movie is never really at the mercy of any of these touchstones; rather it uses or reflects each of them to carry the story a certain distance, but only so that Donovan can pick it up again and proceed further along his own route. And because tortured cinephilia is one of its key and integral themes, it justifies its borrowings in a broader context–as the reflection of a hero who can view life only in relation to movies he’s seen. Donovan can’t be accused of lazy copying and recycling, in the manner of De Palma and most of the other slasher specialists; there’s never any doubt that he has his own story to tell. (Starting out as an actor in several films, including Fellini’s Satyricon, Donovan worked as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on Ludwig and Conversation Piece before turning to theater as a writer and director; his first and only previous feature, State of Wonder, which I haven’t seen, was made about five years ago.)
The hero is Adrian LeDuc (Colin Firth), the operator of a faltering movie revival house. He is not a very likable sort, though there’s something rather touching at times about his entrapment in his multiple neuroses. Reclusive, sexually repressed, resolutely apolitical, and paranoid by nature–a veritable closet case–he lives in an apartment house full of gregarious neighbors whom he studiously avoids. He surrounds himself at home with framed portraits of movie stars, and spends most of the little money he has on his ailing mother’s hospital bills. Although he’s Argentine by birth, he’s been educated in England; as a means of holding others at a distance, he insists on speaking English exclusively and even pretends to be an Englishman who has no knowledge of Spanish. Running into debt, he’s forced to take on a boarder; a mysterious, charismatic American hunk in blue jeans and T-shirt named Jack Carney (Hart Bochner) turns up and immediately wins him over.
If all of Apartment Zero were realized with the same power and resonance as these two characters, it would be an outright masterpiece. Even apart from Firth and Bochner, the movie still has a lot going for it: a flair for black comedy that crops up at unexpected yet apposite moments; a bombastic, grandiloquent, and highly original score by Elia Cmiral that occasionally suggests some of the emotional directness of Gato Barbieri’s music in Last Tango in Paris; a documentary feeling for Buenos Aires that deftly catches its various moods at different times of day; a witty and apt sense of filmic reference in Adrian’s moviegoing tastes and habits; periodic blackouts between scenes that effectively add to the overall hallucinatory atmosphere.
