I’ve gone over this shortly in my Letterboxd review, but it’s interesting to see how foreigners interpret Apartment Zero vs Argentinians, because most people outside of Latin America simply do not know, haven’t got the slightest notion of what the 1950s-1980s period was like here. In Argentina, during the last dictatorship (which took place from 1976 to 1983), people were literally killed if they were affiliated with the left, with Peronism, or even if they belonged to the LGBT community. You had to be very careful about whom you trusted and who you talked to. If you trusted the wrong person, you could, at best, end up dead, and at worst, end up being tortured for days until you finally died. 30.000 people were killed, their children stolen, their bodies thrown into the Río de La Plata. And Apartment Zero’s entire premise hangs on this fact. Additionally, that Donovan himself is Argentinian has to be taken into account when watching the film, or else certain meanings might be lost.
I will admit that the very first time I saw the film, one idea I couldn’t wrap my head around was having Colin Firth, who is British, play an Argentinian man. The fact that the film was also centred around the last dictatorship, shot so shortly after the Malvinas war, and also apparently directed by a guy who was either American or British, (if his name was anything to go by), felt almost like an insult. But I was curious, and I ended up watching it. A lot of it didn’t make sense to me during my first watch, but I was determined to understand it. Eventually, I found out more about Donovan — mainly that he was Argentinian, and that the queer subtext present in the film had been put in it very deliberately, and a lot of things began to make sense.
Let’s start with Adrian LeDuc: he is an Argentinian man who uses the fact that he has British blood in his veins and a good accent, to pass as a British man and distance himself from both his neighbours and also the ghost of the last dictatorship, which has returned to haunt the country under the form of murders perpetrated by someone from one of the Grupos de Tareas. That his neighbours are mostly European is no coincidence, if we remember that Argentina had just been forced to go to war with the British by the military coup in 1982, and that that same dictatorship had been aided by the US Government in their fight against Communism in all of South America (AKA the Condor Operation.) The way Adrian acts towards them and everything related to the last dictatorship—his adamant decision to keep politics off his cinema, his wariness, and distrust of his neighbours who he repeatedly refers to as “nosy”—is a strategy that many Argentinians adopted in real life. “Don’t trust people. Look the other way and you’ll be safe. Don’t get involved in politics. If you have the means to “pass” as a good, Catholic citizen, then do, because that will ensure you live.” Adrian follows this to the letter, taking full advantage of his natural-born gifts, and roping his mother into the facade as well. But there’s a problem. And that’s his queerness. From the pictures of the sexually ambiguous actors he hangs upon the walls of his apartment, to the obvious attraction he feels towards Jack from the moment he sees him, to even the illness that takes the life of his mother (and then his, in a way), everything about him is queer.
He shuts out his neighbours because he knows he’s “tainted” with that queerness, and that’s dangerous. That no matter how good his English accent is, the British ladies down the hall will see right through it and think it unrecognisable. It’s the main reason he stays away from Vanesa as well, because she is the complete opposite of him: she doesn’t hide away.
The role Jack plays is interesting, especially considering that he has no real identity, and that identity was one of the major things the last dictatorship stripped from those it killed. (Women who gave birth while captive had their children stolen and even adopted by members of the military and also civilians, who changed the names of the babies to hide their true origins). Jack’s very name is also fake, and throughout the film we see him putting different masks on, assuming different identities depending on who his target is. The same thing he has been doing since he was 17. The thing about Jack’s masks is that they are not perfect, and very much like in Adrian’s case, hide a facade that can be easily seen through. And this is why Claudia and the guy in the hotel room end up dead. Whenever Jack is confronted with his own identity, he loses it; the mask slips off his face like water, revealing the real Jack underneath, completely raw. “She came in here. She pointed a fucking finger at me, and she said: I know who you are.” How could Claudia know who he is when he’s no one? When Jack himself doesn’t know who he is anymore? The only moment Jack finds himself is after he finally reveals himself to Adrian. It’s his company, the thought of not having to hide anymore—or in Donovan’s own words: “[continue] hiding, wearing a mask, but not alone”—that makes Jack realise he was just as lonely and as vulnerable as Adrian.
It is also worth noting that Claudia ends up dead because of her involvement with the political group that was hunting Jack, making it a direct parallel with the death of Argentinians during the actual dictatorship. While it might seem like it to the casual viewers, who are ignorant of the sociopolitical context it’s set in, as well as the man who was behind it, Apartment Zero is not a film that digs into gender, murder and sexuality on a thoughtless whim, and it’s much more than a psychological thriller involving Colin Firth making lovey-dovey eyes to a James Dean look-alike murderer played by Hart Bochner. It’s a story about how people—especially queer people—lived under a real dictatorship, whose ghost still haunts this country today.
