re:mote voices

Title:5x2 [Cinq Fois Deux or Five Times Two]
Cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Stephane Freiss
Director: Francois Ozon

5x2 follows five “scenes” in the life of two people. Starting with their divorce, before stepping back by degrees, through the birth of their son, their wedding and back to their first meeting. As we meet Marion (Tedeschi) and Gilles (Freiss) they are obviously at the end of a relationship. Despite the divorce they have agreed to go back to a hotel room and have sex one last time. However, Marion quickly changes her mind, and Gilles is in denial about their problems. Essentially Gilles will not take no for an answer and rapes Marion, before asking her if she wants to give the relationship another go.

As the film steps backwards we get snapshots of the relationship between these two people. On the whole this doesn’t necessarily give a great insight into the scope of who these people are and how they manage to stay together so long; the divorce takes effect at the start of 2003, they had their son in 1999, and obviously met a year or two before that. There has been some discussion about the morality of the film and what it means. Some people have suggested that an event we see as we go back to the earlier stages of the relationship acts to justify Gilles raping Marion. Which strikes me as odd, given the clearest thing that I got from each and every scene was that Gilles is a bastard. In every scene he manages to do something quite thoroughly unpleasant to the people around him. Which for me leaves the impression that Marion is well shot of Gilles, and events entirely justify her desire to see him cut out of her life.

5x2 is released in the UK a week or so after 9 Songs, other than the similarities with numeric titles, there is also the similarity that they both take a not entirely conventional look at two people. 5x2 covers a greater time period than 9 Songs, and has more dialogue, but essentially they both demonstrate the same kind of problems. Which is that a narrative which concentrates too closely on two people, and has a narrow focus creates a void around the people. While the idea might be to create a certain intimacy, which is certainly there to some degree, it also leaves this gap in which they spend the bulk of their lives. A space which would probably give a little bit more flesh to the people involved and who they are.

As for the idea of stepping a film backwards, this is also something which we have seen before. Films like Don’t Move or The Machinist which I saw the same weekend as 5x2 have to a lesser extent devices where the film starts at one point and goes backwards. Though the most obvious example of a film that starts at the end and steps backwards in the same manner as 5x2 is Irreversible. While Irreversible is clearly the more harrowing of the two, 5x2 is still in heavy territory. But, does the gimmick of telling a story in reverse work? To a degree if 5x2 was told from meeting, wedding, birth, dinner party, divorce, then it would be a considerably more conventional narrative. One which would have seen a lot more of in the past. Going the other way round does work as a gimmick, but it also effectively changes the way the film works to some extent.

The performances given by the two leads of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Stephane Freiss are strong. The way they and the production team manage to actually get them to change as the film goes backwards is effective. The most obvious way to change someone’s appearance as though it is a different time is their hairstyle, unsurprisingly this is more easily done for the character Gilles, and for Marion’s father – longer hair, greyer hair, stubble or a beard all being used to demonstrate the changes. Marion’s hair is more consistent, long and flowing, but both the leads do go through other transformations with things like weight – getting thinner as the film goes back. Overall this aspect of the film is well done, and it is nice to be able to note the extent of the changes that are made with the flow from each temporal snapshot to the previous.

5x2 is directed by French director Francois Ozon, who again does something different from his previous films with this outing. Ozon first came to my attention with his film Sitcom, a black soap opera styled comedy. Over the years he has done films like the adaptation of Fassbinder’s play Water Drops On Burning Rocks. But he has gained more world wide attention with his more recent films like Agatha Christie-esque murder and musical 8 Women, or the sultry thriller Swimming Pool. This is a rawer film than his recent work, more straight forward in a narrative sense, perhaps having more in common with Water Drops than the bulk of his output. Ozon tends to work with his cast more than once, Swimming Pool being the second film he had done with both the female leads, Rampling and Sagnier. 5x2 is his first outing with Freiss and Tedeschi, though his next film Le Temps Qui Reste sees him working with Tedeschi for a second time.

Going through Francois Ozon’s back catalogue one can see that he has a tendency towards gimmicks and more unusual narrative devices. This has led to some accusations that he is a clumsy director, reliant on tricks that he can’t entirely pull off and aren’t enough to make up for the films failings. However, for me, Ozon is always an interesting director, and his films are reliably worth seeing. Even if 5x2 does lack some of the undercurrents of humour that have been present in the bulk of his work. Even if in general his films are not entirely perfect. He is making an effort to make interesting films that manage to be consistently different from the bulk of French cinema, let alone the more readily available American cinema.