The Woman In The Fifth ***
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski‘s first film since 2004’s acclaimed My Summer Of Love is set in Paris and combines art-house values with supernatural thriller tendencies that keep things emotive and disorientating. Based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, The Woman In The Fifth also serves as a haunting insight into one man’s struggle to rediscover himself and escape the clutches of mental illness.
American writer and university professor Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) goes to Paris to reconcile with his estranged wife Nathalie (Delphine Chuillot) and resume some sort of relationship with their young daughter (Julie Papillon). But after being turned away and rob of his belongings on a bus going to the outer city limits, Ricks finds himself in a seedy, rundown French Arab quarter with a security night job to finance his bed and board as he struggles to write his second novel and see his daughter. Meanwhile, the author is invited to a party and meets a strange and beguiling woman called Margrit (Kristin Scott Thomas) who offers both sexual and artistic enlightenment but has a disturbing mystery surrounding her.
Pawlikowski employs all the ‘stranger about town’ filmic ploys to land his protagonist in a foreign place at rock bottom, far from the good-humoured charm of An American In Paris. Ricks seems like a victim of self-inflicted circumstances at first – even though he fairs better than most with a command of French, and the story cleverly moves between this and instigator as the story unfolds and Ricks digs in deeper.
In production terms, Pawlikowski perpetuates a disturbing atmosphere further by favouring little known scenery of the French capital to completely unsettle the status quo. In so doing, he concentrates on pockets of ‘undiscovered’ life, keeping his locations to a bare minimum and disorientated and often claustrophobic to allow the character reflection to fully develop. In so doing, it is never clear what is fact and what is fiction, helped by the re/appearance of Margrit, and the viewer feels constantly toyed with.
Hawke is suitable awkward, fussy and tragically lost as bookish Ricks on the one hand, but dangerously adventurous and too curious for his own good on the other – a pure dichotomy of a character which keeps the story fresh, unhinged and oddly real. Scott Thomas although exquisite as ever, offers nothing remarkably new here, merely playing the sexually confident older woman on an easy ego trip. Margrit is almost too much of an enigma, with no real enlightenment offered at the end. Merely suggesting that she is a possible figment of Rick’s imagination does little to satisfy the mystery, and results in a muddled and frustrating conclusion.
That said Pawlikowski’s skill at creating a sense of vulnerability and edginess to his characters, combined with some fine performances is what keeps the essence of his latest project an intriguing reflection of the many facets of the human psyche in times of hardship.
3/5 stars
By @FilmGazer
