With thematic content that is still relevant today anywhere from NYC to Tokyo, the heart of this very real human dramedy is that quiet, simple love endures and triumphs in the end, and that there is hope for the millions of people feeling trapped and lonely in what seems to be otherwise insignificant lives.
The Apartment is a beautiful and endearing film that shows its audiences the greater meaning behind the vanities of life. How love, modest elegance and principles in character ultimately overrule self centredness, indulgence, and materialistic corporate ladder decadence. In fact, regardless of the corporate settings for the main character, the essential element of the rat race that everyone plays today, as well as the content delving into extramarital adulterous liaisons, considered taboo during its time, is what ensures the film its very timeless quality, and its relevance to the modern world till today. It is these qualities that have caused the film to earn labels like, being 'ahead of its time' or a 'classic'. And what a classic it is.
Billy Wilder, the writing talent behind such brilliant works as "Ninotchka", makes this film his second outing after the highly celebrated "Some Like it Hot". Many felt he might be hard pressed to top that, but in a totally different direction thematically, does so with this film. The story is much more about the dramatic pinpricks of human tragedy and loneliness insofar as it is laced with comedic turns about a man who loans his apartment out to bosses for their extramarital liaisons in order to gain their approval and climb the ladder at work. But complications ensue when he discovers a beautiful woman he desires to court is actually inimically one of the objects exploited beguilingly by his very boss in his very apartment, forcing him into an impugning quagmire. Wilder blends these elements in perfect harmony in this film, with the chemistry between the cast of the wry humoured Jack Lemmon and the cloy beauty of Shirley MacLaine (Wilder would pair them again for Irma Douce) neatly balanced with the pure wit and pacing of the script, whilst always undergirding the whole film with a sense of a genuine sanctity for compassion for the whole plot. Far from considering the film an insult on the many who play sycophantic roles on the way up the rat race or corporate ladder, or the adulterous men, the cynicism can be construed with much verecund indignation as it highlights the sadness of it all without being condescending. In fact, the characters speak of the struggle each City dweller in modern living can identify with.
There is no condescending need to present anyone as perfect, overtly altruistic, overtly feminine nor elegant (MacLaine's character is a lift attendant) nor flawless in their life choices. They make mistakes, sweat over them, and regret. A real rarity for films emerging out of Hollywood on the back of the 1950s with swashbuckling heroines and heroes. Lemmon's character is a simple bachelor with an air of inevitable loneliness in the meanderings of life in a NY apartment. That's why they call them a-part-ments. You live apart. And alone. He is an amalgam of a laid back yet pre-emptively self serving corporate machine, who ostensibly is forced into playing the only role he knows in order to better his predicament of being merely yet another average diploma staffer on Wall St- to climb up the corporate-ladder in his General insurance firm. The real beauty here in Wilder's script is that Lemmon, and also Maclaine (who makes the wrong choices by being mistress to Lemmon's boss), is that both characters harness a true propensity for love and care that is nestled within, waiting to exhale whilst in the midst of them being stuck in their cyclical ruts of despair.
The real satisfaction comes when both these characters reconcile each others pains, heal each other (literally too in the classic doctor scene) and find love amid the hustle bustle of the rat race in the world that goes on around them, championing each other on. They play gin rummy in the final scene, in heart wrenchingly beautiful emotional overtones, kept painfully modest by Wilder, and celebrating the simple love that triumphs over all hurts. The themes are relevant till today, and the quality of what this film achieved stylistically (as the last of the B&W generation) remains extant in full living colour today, because of the sheer timeless message of hope this film carries to anyone who's ever been that insignificant other, or ordinary person to be forgotten in that apartment out there.
For that alone, it deserves an 8/10.
By Stephen Thanabalan
