Apartment 12(2000)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

(a.k.a. Life/Drawing)
Though Alex (Mark Ruffalo) pretty much falls for Lori (Beth Ulrich), he decides to dump her due to his continued wallowing in self-pity over his failings as an artist and his trouble accepting several aspects of her personality, interests, and beliefs that do not conform with his own. She starts going out with an obnoxious lawyer who works in the office building that Alex regularly delivers pizzas to, and this gets on Alex’s nerves very quickly, showing that he is regretting his decision (and, in actuality, so is Lori, who finds herself thinking about him a lot).

One night, he tries to rebound from the split by developing a connection with another tenant, Darlene (Krystina Carson), but it ends badly. While walking back to his apartment afterwards, he spots Lori outside her apartment with the lawyer, and the lawyer invites himself inside after claiming that he needs to use her phone. Alex tries to peep in on them from outside the building to see what is going on, but he winds up accidentally peeping in on the lonely tenant, Sylvia (Mary Coleston), while she is showering, and she calls the police on him. An officer quickly comes and arrests Alex for prowling, and Alex is unable to convince him that he is a resident of the tenement because he doesn’t have any form of identification on him. The cop brings Alex up to the front door of the apartment that Ray (Alan Gelfant), the manager, resides in in order to get confirmation from him that Alex is a tenant here, and Lori and the lawyer soon come out into the hallway to see what is going on. When the lawyer insults Alex, Alex tackles him and bites him several times (since his hands are cuffed behind his back) until the policeman gets a hold of him again and takes him away. Upset with Alex, Lori heads back into her apartment, and she locks the lawyer out.

When Alex returns in the morning, he manages to have a talk with Lori in the lobby while she is attempting to go out somewhere, and she first rebukes him for dumping her and his reasons for doing so before rebuking him for trying to spy on her and attacking her date. She then accuses Alex of wanting a woman who is just a female version of himself, and knowing that Lori is alluding to his previous girlfriend, Yvette (Anne-Marie Johnson), whom she briefly met at an art exhibition that he took her to, Alex informs her that Yvette dumped him. She replies that that doesn’t really matter, and before she leaves, she tells him that he should figure out what he wants out of his love life and life in general, and then, he can quit wasting everyone else’s time. As Alex makes his way back to his apartment, Ray stops him, and he tells him that he is kicking him out of the tenement both because he brought the cops here and because he is sick of him moping around the halls and creating all kinds of problems. He then gives Alex a short but well-spoken opinion about his artwork, basically telling him that it is shallow and soulless (just like what the art gallery curator told him about his artwork at the start of the film before cancelling his exhibition), and he also tells Alex that he has a lot of nerve calling himself an artist. Alex then finds another Spam casserole from Sylvia outside his apartment door, along with a note saying that she thinks that he is a sad and sick man. Soon after going inside with the casserole, all of his frustrations finally boil over, which causes him to throw the casserole onto one of his painted canvases and then trash some of his art supplies. After taking a moment to calm down, he looks at the food-covered canvas, and we see a spark of inspiration in his eyes.

In the next scene, we see Alex holding a successful artwork exhibition at the art gallery, where he has decorated all of his painted canvases with an assortment of splattered foods. Yvette is among the many impressed art patrons, and she ends up inviting Alex back to her place and gives off signals indicating that she wants to reconcile with him. However, he soon understands how much he truly loves Lori, and he accepts that Yvette is only trying to get back together with him because of his newfound success as an artist and that she will likely kick him to the curb again if it ever falters. With those thoughts in mind, he leaves Yvette’s house – and her life – for good.

After spending the rest of the night and most of the morning driving around and thinking, Alex heads back to the tenement building to rekindle his romance with Lori. After passing by Sylvia near the entrance while she is having a pleasant, affectionate time with a guy she has recently met, he walks into Lori’s apartment, but he only finds Ray in there cleaning up the place. Ray tells Alex that Lori moved out the night before, and she told him to give this to him, after which he hands Alex the napkin with the drawings of the salt and pepper shakers on them that he drew for her on the date where they kissed for the first time. Alex asks Ray where she has moved to, and he ultimately decides to give him this information despite it being against policy.

In the next scene, we see Lori doing a load of laundry in the basement of the new apartment building that she lives in. When she returns to her apartment, she notices that the front door is mysteriously ajar, and when she goes in, she sees that the sketchbook that she had earlier gifted to Alex is resting on her table. She leafs through it and sees that it is full of drawings that Alex made of her sleeping while they were together, and soon after, she looks up from it and sees him standing in front of her, having earlier entered her apartment due to her leaving the door unlocked. The two of them then start to take steps towards a reconciliation.