The Apartment, Billy Wilder

Jack Lemmon is a young suck-up bullshiter drone getting ahead at the office by letting his managers use his bachelor pad apartment as a place to bring their mistresses. He seems to have no connections to the outside world except for his neighbor and his job. Despite these qualities, he creates a certain amount of affability, mostly with body language and delivery.

Shirley Maclaine is the elevator operator bottom in love with the everything-out-of his-mouth-is-a-lie lothario upper manager who promotes Lemon.

All the relationships are pure form/ and/or power exchanges. No actual affinity is show between anyone. The relationships capitalism likes to create? Bullet-like noirish dialogue but for comic effect.

The real theme is the disconnection between people on the job that happens as they are relating to each other – like when Lemon, with a goofy smile asks Maclaine if she likes his ridiculous hat. She nods and talks about the hat, but the expression on her face tell us she is devastated by what she has just been told by the secretary who also had an affair with the boss she is love with. Later Lemmon will have a whole conversation with Maclaine, unaware that she is unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills.

The vast, disconcerting Manhattan office hive-space is filmed in much the same flat shiny inhuman way the office spaces were early in the first Matrix movie. This is contrasted with the way Lemon's Upper West Side apartment is shot. It is shown with at least three different spatial levels at any given moment, which emphasizes the multiple possibilities of life and thought that never occur to any of the characters.