5X2 Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
THINKfilm
Grade: B+
Directed by: Francois Ozon
Written by: Francois Ozon, Emmanuele Bernheim
Cast: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Stephane Freiss, Geraldine
Pailhas, Francoise Fabian, Michael Lonsdale, Antoine Chappey
Screened at: Lincoln Plz, NYC, 6/12/05 Before you go to see this well-constructed, heartfelt, even true-to-life film about romance and disappointment, consider some quotations about love. “‘Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all.” Tennyson “Love Begins with a smile, grows with a kiss, and ends with a teardrop.” Anonymous “There is love, of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.” Jean Anouilh “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” G.K. Chesterton “The hottest love has the coldest end.” -Socrates Taken as a group, these quotes are tentative about love,
pessimistic about its outcome. Director Francois Ozon visually illustrates that point in a movie, which he co-write with Emmanuele Bernheim, five chapters centering on two people. What is unusual, though not wholly original, about its construction is that Ozon’s chapters run in reverse. This is like reading the last pages of a book to see how things turn out, thereby to be motivated to go back and see just how and why the outcome is what it is. To put this another way, as teachers of history are wont to say, it’s like saying “Look at the world as both the mess and the glory it is now. Now let’s find out how things turned out that way. “5x2" gets away with its reverse construction, though one might easily say that if Ozon opened with the beginning and proceeded to the conclusion, no drama would be lost. Perhaps Socrates’s quote best illustrates “5x2,” that “The hottest love has the coldest end.” We open on a cold end indeed, as Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stephane Freiss) sit in an impersonal, government courtroom, the judge (who’s not judgmental) reading the settlement agreement knocked out by the married couple prior to this, their day of divorce. The couple are despondent, neither really joyous about the action they pursue, and in fact move against all common sense by heading right from the divorce court to a seedy motel room for one last tryst. What do they have in mind when they do this? They really don’t know, Ozon doesn’t know, and what’s more the director is quite content covering the screen with actions that appear to have no particular motivation at all! That’s fine. Though script-writing 101 may say that you must motivate all actions, a more advanced course would dictate that if you have a solid reputation in your field (such as Ozon has with such films as his intriguing psychological character study “Swimming Pool”), you can throw the rules out. No matter why we do what we do. We ourselves may not know: why should anyone else try to explain us? We’re taken back some time to eavesdrop on the still-married couple’s entertaining Gilles’s gay brother, Christophe (Antoine Chappey) and his young squeeze (Marc Richman), wherein we hear a scene that could have come out of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” though Marion’s torment is internal only. Gilles describes the one time he was unfaithful in his marriage. Chapter three introduces a flaw in Gilles’s character, as he abstains from rushing to the hospital when his wife is giving birth. Why? We don’t know. Probably Gilles doesn’t either. At the wedding scene which follows (again, a prequel to what we’ve already seen), Marion displays a flaw in her own character. In the final scene (actually the beginning of the romance), we come to what love and marriage are all about: the romantic meeting at a distant location, wading in the water of a Club-Med-like resort while watching the sunset. Life is not all about sunsets (see the above quotes again). There must have been a reason for the failure of this marriage after six years, but we’re not let in on it. Why not? An artistic choice of the director which is quite justfied: we often do not know ourselves what makes us tick, what pushes us to turn love into indifference. Veteran Italian-born star Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi runs the gamut of emotions exquisitely, whether she’s yelling full blast at rape, shedding an inconspicuous tear while pretending to support her husband’s tale of an orgy, or simply enjoying the scenery without a conspicuous show of feeling. Not Rated. 90 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
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