"At the end of any especially troublesome year it's always good to revisit The Apartment, Billy Wilder's brilliantly bleak comedy of office politics and festive bad cheer. It memorably ends on the stroke of midnight as heartsick Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) abandons a drunken new year's party to be with hapless, jobless CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) instead. Is The Apartment suggesting that Kubelik and Baxter then live happily ever after?"
"Probably not, because I've never been convinced that these two lovers are going to stay the course. They're too mismatched and desperate; their wounds are still too fresh. What the ending gives us is the next best thing: a sudden sense of hope and freedom, with everything packed in boxes except for a bottle, two glasses and a deck of cards. Nothing to lose and nowhere to go. Shut up and deal."
The Apartment concludes at midnight with Fran Kubelik abandoning a drunken New Year's party to join CC Baxter, offering a sudden sense of hope and freedom rather than assured happily-ever-after. The couple's mismatch and fresh wounds imply uncertainty; the ending foregrounds a clean break and portable simplicity: boxes, a bottle, two glasses, and a deck of cards. Strange Days, initially a commercial flop, has gained esteem as a pre-millennial techno-noir in which Angela Bassett tries to rouse a lovelorn VR addict (Ralph Fiennes) to expose an LAPD conspiracy, serving as a cautionary tale about virtual seductions and structural real-world flaws. The Irony of Fate appears as another New Year screen reference.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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