The Apartment

About to fly to Tokyo for work, Max thinks he hears in a café the voice of Lisa, whom he lost two years ago. He does not board the plane and starts looking for her. As he tries to work out who lives in the empty apartment he finds, the story doubles back, then moves into someone else's view, and the same events are built a third time with an entirely different meaning. In his first film Gilles Mimouni uses coincidence as a mechanism: what each character knows is incomplete and the missing piece arrives in the next section. Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci and Romane Bohringer star. The editing is the real performance. Hollywood remade it as Wicker Park but simplified the structure. Who it is for: viewers who like games with structure and nineties French thrillers. Who it is not for: anyone with no patience for scattered chronology.