L'Appartement des filles (1963)
Directed by Michel Deville

Film Review

Unlikely as it may seem, L'Appartement des filles started out as a conventional film policier before Michel Deville and his faithful screenwriter Nina Companéez were roped in to rework the script and mould it into something completely different.  Deville had already directed one hard-boiled crime-thriller (in partnership with Charles Gérard), Une balle dans le canon (1958), and this second excursion into policier territory is hardly an unqualified success but it does have a great deal going for it, not least of which is a dazzling trio of sixties glamour girls who seem to spend most of the film parading about in their skimpy underwear for the benefit of Sami Frey.  Nice work if you can get it, Monsieur Frey.

L'Appartement des filles completes a quartet of light but irresistible romantic comedies that make up the first tranche of Deville's weirdly eclectic oeuvre.  In common with the three films that preceded it - Ce soir ou jamais (1961), Adorable menteuse (1962) and À cause, à cause d'une femme (1963) - it playfully satirises the sexual revolution of the early 60s, with women playing a more active and mischievous role in the age-old game of seduction.  The success of these intensely likeable films established Michel Deville's reputation as an auteur with popular appeal and allowed to him to gravitate to deeper and darker studies in desire in later years.

The film originated as a crime novel of the same title by Jacques Robert, whose work had already been adapted for cinema (Les Dents longues by Daniel Gélin in 1952, Marie-Octobre by Julien Divivier in 1959), but its thriller elements only come to the fore in the later third of the film.  Before we get to this, Deville and Companéez serve up another amusing comedy confection, in which Sami Frey has the decidedly enviable job of choosing between Mylène Demongeot, Renate Ewert and Sylva Koscina - airline hostesses who can hardly wait to get out of their uniforms - for his next criminal exploit.  Deville's penchant for tasteful eroticism is in evidence throughout the film and whilst L'Appartement des filles is very much a film of its time it manages to nimbly sidestep the exploitative vulgarity seen in most other French sex comedies of this era.  Deville was not only a great auteur, he was also a master of seduction.

Switching gear in its final third, and looking as if it has suddenly woken up to the fact that it is supposed to be a thriller, the film concludes in the manner of a Billy Wilder farce, with Mylène Demongeot (now literally worth her weight in gold) and a nonchalant Sami Frey on the run from a gang of crooks who look as if they have just escaped from a Mack Sennett comedy of the 1920s.  Having failed to blow up an expensive sports car (cue the film's best gag), our enterprising duo try to make a quick getaway on a horse, only to discover that horse power is not all it is cracked up to be.  Sophisticated it isn't, but you'll be hard pressed to find another Michel Deville film offering as much carefree humour and unadorned female pulchritude as this one.

Film Synopsis

Not for Tibère the life-sapping tedium of a routine office job.  He sees himself as a man of derring-do, a man who scorns danger and lives for the present.  Had he been born two hundred years ago, he would most probably have been a pirate, a cutlass-wielding scourge of the high seas.  Sadly, piracy has become a tad dépassé these days, so Tibère must content himself with the slightly more restrained activity of professional gold smuggler.  For his next job, he sets about recruiting an attractive air hostess, Elena, to help smuggle a small fortune in gold to Bombay.  Elena is easily won over by Tibère's seductive charms and proves to be a more than willing accomplice in his criminal exploit.

When Tibère discovers that Elena shares an apartment with two other air hostesses - Lolotte and Mélanie - he can hardly believe his good fortune.  Good luck just seems to rain on him all the time these days!  Without delay, Tibère sets about winning Elena's flatmates over to his cause, confident that either of them would make a superb accomplice.  It seems that all three women have the same thirst for adventure and like nothing better than flirting with the handsome stranger.  Tibère owes his success so far to his ability to keep his professional activities and private life in separate compartments.  If ever the two become conflated he is sure to find himself in serious trouble - as he discovers when he begins to fall in love with Mélanie...