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5x2
2004 Drama / Romance
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Credits
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Director: François Ozon
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Script: François Ozon, Emmanuèle Bernheim
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Photo: Yorick Le Saux
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Music: Philippe Rombi, Paolo Conte, Gino Paoli, Iller Pataccini, Luigi Tenco, Alec Wilder
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Cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
(Marion),
Stéphane Freiss (Gilles),
Géraldine Pailhas (Valérie),
Françoise Fabian (Monique),
Michael Lonsdale (Bernard),
Antoine Chappey (Christophe),
Marc Ruchmann (Mathieu),
Jason Tavassoli (American Man),
Jean-Pol Brissart (Judge)
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Country: France
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Language: French
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Runtime: 90 min
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Aka: Cinq fois deux; Five Times Two
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Summary
After several years together, Marion and Gilles finally decide to put an end to their
marriage. Their divorce ceremony over, they meet for one last time in a hotel room.
It is one final opportunity to relive former happy moments but it only manages to extinguish
forever their passion for one another. This outcome could have been foreseen some
months before, at a dinner party, or, even before that, at the birth of their son.
Even their marriage day was not without some trauma. Were they ever truly in love…?
Review
Having given us some breathtakingly stylish and original pieces of cinema in recent years,
François Ozon has taken most people by surprise with this latest offering: a seemingly
anodyne portrayal of a couple falling in and out of love, told in reverse. Inspired
by Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes
from a Marriage , the film relates five key events in the turbulent relationship
of an obviously ill-matched couple, offering a deeply cynical view of romantic love which
is characteristically Ozon-esque.
Once again, the director can hardly be faulted on his technique – the film is beautifully
composed, using close-ups to devastating effect to drive home the full psychological impact
of a disintegrating love affair. Ozon’s lead actors, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
and Stéphane Freiss, convey real emotion in their finely tuned performances which
elevate a pretty mediocre script to the level, almost, of a classic piece of drama.
However, the film is not without its faults. Its reversed five-part composition
emphasises weaknesses both in the characterisation and the structure of the film.
Near the end of the film, it is hard to imagine how Gilles and Marion could ever have
got it together, and so their meeting has a more than a touch of implausibility.
However, the rot sets in way before then. After a promising first couple of segments,
the film throws up a number of unresolved questions about the nature of the relationship.
Why is Gilles so reluctant to attend the birth of his child? Why does Marion allow
an unknown man to seduce her on her wedding night? It’s rather like a series of
loud bangs going off in the background, without any real justification – a crude and ineffective
way of bringing dramatic tension into the narrative. A more subtle approach would
have been far more effective.
Whilst it may not be Ozon’s best work to date, there
are some things which do mark 5x2 out as significant.
A fair criticism of Ozon’s cinema is that there tends to be plenty of style but a lack
of genuine human emotion. For all its faults, 5x2
does convey a deeper sense of compassion, humanity and emotional torment
than most, if not all, of Ozon’s earlier films. In that sense, it is a more mature
and thoughtful work than what has gone before, and gives a good indication that François
Ozon’s greatest films are yet to come.
© James Travers 2006
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