Reseñas de la crítica

What emerges, then, is a savage critique in the guise of a light-hearted dramedy and, as such, The Apartment can be rediscovered today as an urgent story about a woman. Wronged by patriarchal capitalism, it is in Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) that we locate the film's heart. Smart, funny and kind, Kubelik is the underdog that patriarchy callously clambours over on its way to the top.

We learn of these entanglements before Fran and Bud do, casting a pall of dramatic irony over the film that's redolent of Wilder's noir-driven work. Yet the tone of The Apartment differs from both those darkly moral movies and the filmmaker's farces, finding a middle ground of somber tragedy that undercuts the awkward comedy of manners between the characters.

Not only is it the most Jewish Christmas movie Hollywood ever made, it's the baseline for all NYC-based romcoms since–all romcoms worth their salt, really. As clever as it is melancholy, New York's grabby, glamorous melting pot presides as a central character, and its lonelyhearts discover each other via a Manhattan scavenger hunt of great flourishes and rueful afterthoughts. Neither Jack Lemmon nor Shirley Maclaine were ever so sweethearted again, and that's saying a mouthful.

But even in the bleakest of Christmases, there's always hope. It thrives on it. And it's precisely hope that Billy Wilder's beloved 1960 film offers the world. A turning point even for its director, in his own way, after years of fixating on high-flung stories drenched in Hollywood glamour and the affairs of writers, detectives, playboys and pilots; all delivered with a healthy dose of cynicism, too, peaking with 1951's bleak Ace in the Hole. But all that changed with The Apartment, a film that deals with love. Real love. A kind quiet, pained, but with eyes fixed on the stars above.

The romance is so affecting (to say nothing of the dialogue, which pops as only Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's writing can) that it's easy to overlook what a superior piece of filmmaking THE APARTMENT is. Wilder remains underrated as a visual artist; and here, working in sparkling black-and-white 'Scope, he creates some remarkable effects, such as the unforgettable loneliness of the apartment itself and the modernist nightmare of the insurance company office.

Wilder and Diamond's screenplay is the foundation of this well-told tale. It makes masterly use of set-ups and payoffs, most of them encoded in props, such as the cracked makeup mirror that reveals that Fran is Jeff's mistress (while also reflecting her shattered self-image)... The movie is a masterpiece, structure-wise and otherwise—a rare Best Picture Oscar winner that might actually have been the year's best picture.

Most importantly, “The Apartment” perfectly captures the casual dehumanization of modern corporate culture. It illustrates how easy it is for people to fall into a culture that cares more about their usefulness than their individual humanity, and how that culture can subtly infect your entire perspective, like making you believe that your worth is in the hands of other people.

Wilder, a bilious and mercurial wit, here becomes a wide-screen master of time, parcelling out the office hours, days, and—seemingly—years in meticulously incremental scenes; only Lemmon's eager-beaver chirpiness and MacLaine's archetypal pixified sparkle fix a smile on the grim struggle at the movie's core.

Mr. Wilder has done more than write the film. His direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line.

Most of the time, it’s up to director Wilder to sustain a two-hour-plus film on treatment alone, a feat he manages to accomplish more often than not, and sometimes the results are amazing. The dialogue, and its execution, are frank

Wilder never loses sight of the fact that whatever the moral of the story, the moral of theatre is to divert the spectator, and for a parable to be effective, it must first and always entertain. The Apartment certainly does that.