While Firth is gearing up for the publicity push that will inevitably surround the release of "Valmont," he was actually in town to talk about another movie: Martin Donovan's extraordinary thriller, "Apartment Zero," which opens Friday. At the Seattle International Film Festival three months ago, it won the audience awards for best picture and director.

Firth plays the very un-Valmont-like part of a repressed, neurotic Buenos Aires film buff named Adrian, who is so obsessed with movies that he declares at one point that he can't be friends with anyone who's never heard of Geraldine Page. When Adrian takes in an American roommate of questionable background (Hart Bochner), their relationship and the film start to function on increasingly complicated psychological-political levels.

"Adrian's only reference point is film," said Firth. "He only understands film language. When Jack (the Bochner character) turns up, it's as if he'd just stepped off the screen and into Adrian's life. Adrian is such a pitiful creature, so transparent; he sees himself as a David Niven character, the perfect English gentleman, but he's really quite pathetic."

Firth based his characterization on a couple of people he knows, and a "precious, brittle movie-obsessive" he once observed at a British art house. He thinks the character's speech patterns "come out of constipation"; during the shooting of the film, he and Donovan decided to include several scenes in which Adrian talks to himself, once in Spanish.

"I think I gave Adrian a certain neurotic fastidiousness that is not in the script, but Hart had the more difficult job," he said. "He had to appear to be a boring fellow, and it's tough to play that kind of superficially easygoing character. He was very intense about getting it right. I know very few English actors who ever take the job as seriously as Hart did."

During the three months he stayed in Buenos Aires, Firth became increasingly aware of the political focus of the script, which makes frequent references to the recent repressiveness of the Argentine government.

"Just five years ago, they were scooping people up off the street," he said. "I loved the country, which has such an air of sophistication that you can't see why they're repeatedly susceptible to fascism. But it's a very badly damaged place." When he returned to England, he was so concerned that he joined Amnesty International.      Return to the top.

When, aged 11, Martin Donovan saw Visconti's classic film, Senso, he fell in love: 'With the film, with Alida Valli - so luminous! - and with that world created by this man. So, that night I wrote him a letter and I put: 'Luchino Visconti, Italy, Europe.' And he got it. Not only that. He replied!' Twenty-six years later, and now a successful film director in his own right, Donovan still has awe in his voice when he mentions Visconti's name. For that first letter marked the beginning of a friendship which only ended with Visconti's death in 1976, and which clearly influenced Donovan's own film-making.

Donovan's latest film, Apartment Zero ... is a psycho-thriller set in Argentina. Shot in a claustrophobic apartment block in an eerie, murkily-lit Buenos Aires, it depicts the close friendship which develops between two very unlikely people: Adrian LeDuc, a reclusive cinema-club owner (Colin Firth) and Jack Carney, his American lodger (Hart Bochner).

Donovan's real name is Carlos Enrique Varela y Peralta-Ramos. He took the Christian name and the surname respectively of two friends, both now dead, who helped him survive when, at the age of 14, he left his privileged middle-class background because he felt 'too oppressed'. He simply climbed out of his window one night, leaving his mother a note saying 'Please don't cry'. Twenty-three years and 675 letters later, they're the best of friends.

Apartment Zero has so far won prizes in Seattle, Washington DC and Taormina. 'This is all totally unexpected because it was such a personal film. One isn't allowed to make this kind of film anymore. Especially in America. It's all so monitored by the big studios, that for independents it's very, very hard to make personal, smaller films.

"It cost dollars 1.5 million. For America, that is nothing. But for me? It was the biggest luxury that I've ever had! And shooting in Argentina! I was so aware that with that money, I could have fed an entire province for a month, and that created an enormous responsibility for me. So we took it very seriously and I think that spirit prevailed. Even Colin - he's a magic actor - came to Argentina knowing all there was to know about the country. As an Englishman, he put all his Englishness aside. He learnt Spanish, he drank and ate with the crew."

For a moment Donovan loses his own peculiar kind of Englishness - emphasised by his elegantly understated clothes and rather reserved manner. It's his spoken English which gives him away. Suddenly his intonation changes and he puts unusual stress on a vowel or a whole word.

"Apartment Zero for me was a metaphor for Argentina. For me, Adrian LeDuc is Argentina - old-fashioned, elegant, detached. He senses himself invaded by a presence which he at first finds positive. By the time he discovers that it is not, it's too late. He's grown used to it."

Colin Firth also found himself disturbed and fascinated by Argentina. "There was something in the air which was confusing,' Firth says, 'because Argentina is no longer a place where people 'disappear'. There aren't any death squads in action now, but there were five years ago. It must have been like a surrealist nightmare! This is actually what the film is about, the fact that the monster hasn't gone away."

At the Berlin film festival, Apartment Zero was not a success. It was considered too derivative. 'But I made it obvious on purpose!' Donovan maintains. 'It was a game, but it was also important because that's what Argentina is for me, a combination of different backgrounds and ethnic groups and styles! The colour, the light, LeDuc's relationship with his mother, were Visconti. The baroque was pure Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson, an extraordinary man, who was, perhaps, one of the greatest Argentinian directors. Then there was Carol Reed and Roman Polanski, certainly.'

The film hasn't been shown in Argentina. "It's a terrible pity," Donovan says. But he's not surprised. He left Argentina at 17, after a play he wrote had been banned. "I had no political ideas, but probably I knew subconsciously what was going to happen. Argentina was so beautiful, a paradise! In Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile terrible things were happening, and Argentinians thought it could never happen to them. My play showed that lack of awareness."

Since then, Donovan has only been back to Argentina twice - first to rescue an 18- month-old child, whose parents had 'disappeared' (now 14 years old and his legally adopted son); the second time was to film Apartment Zero.      Return to the top.

The first half of "Apartment Zero" is as dark, dangerous, appealing and, yes, schizophrenic as its catalyst, sexually and psychologically ambiguous Jack Carney (Hart Bochner).

Novice film maker Martin Donovan takes his movie right over the top, lets it go completely, irritatingly, out of control. But while he loses control, he doesn't lose that ephemeral spark that ignites too few films.

"Apartment Zero" is almost as captivating as it is maddening.

In Buenos Aires, Adrian LeDuc (Colin Firth) is a man living on the edge. He is reclusive, friendless by choice. He thinks he is a closeted gay, but the door to his soul is open, more than a crack. What he thinks he keeps secret he lays open to the world with his repressed, pitiably transparent nature.

Adrian is obsessive and isolated. He buries his emotions but pours his passion into old movies. Glamorous portraits of Gene Tierney, Monty Clift and dozens of other vintage screen legends fill his fussy apartment.

What has been a comfortable, upper middle class existence shows signs of incipient, disasterous change. Adrian runs a repertory cinema, but the onslaught of home video is destroying his business.

He is allowing his family-owned apartment building to fall to ruins. "Mice!" shrieks the bevy of tenants. Occupying No. 10, the "1" has long since fallen away never to be replaced. Hence the apartment "0" to match Adrian's shattering state of mind.

As obsessed with his mother as he is with old films, he's slowly eaten away during visits to the hospital where a mental disease eats her away.

Adrian is completely out of touch with reality as most of us know it - untroubled by street crime, the rising cost of living, global warming, and, more specifically, the torturous political climate of Argentina, where people still have a habit of disappearing, and others die by a bullet to the back of the head.

Enter Jack, who answers Adrian's ad for a housemate.

Jack, who can be all things to all people, Jack who is the immediate object of Adrian's infatuation.

Before long, Donovan is off on a convoluted, overlong tale of political intrigue and death squads, and it's the kind of troublesome exercise that can only happen when a writer directs his own work. Donovan knows each word is golden, and, for better or worse (and it's invariably worse), he never cuts a one. "Apartment Zero" weighs in at more than two hours.

What makes the time investment worthwhile are the fabulously eccentric inhabitants of the apartment house and Donovan's sporadically riveting portrait of the strange symbiosis of an obsessive relationship.

It doesn't matter that Adrian and Jack are societal freaks. What they give to and take from each other, the clutching desperation, you recognize from bad relationships everywhere.

Donovan shows some honest moments of wit in his writing and his camera work.

Adrian and Jack's neighbors are an oddball collection of the displaced, most of them maladjusted, all of them well-meaning, cozily nosy and desperate in their own way - for attention, friendship, concern. Small wonder they're all eager for whatever form of affection Jack is willing to offer.

Colin Firth wades through Donovan's excesses to invest Adrian with an absolute believability.

Bochner just has to look pretty and behave seductively; it's Firth who's really playing dangerously, giving in to pressures just enough, giving himself away with a terrible humanity. He now has absolved himself from [the] wretched, costumed hijinks of "Valmont."      Return to the top.