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PLOT: This love story runs backward, starting with the dry details of a divorce and moving past married life, the birth of a child, the wedding day and the circumstances of how the couple met in the first place. One's interest in the outcome is intriguing, considering the film starts out as it does.
Ordinary people are under the microscope in 5 X 2, Francois Ozon's intense film about a marriage coming undone.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi stars as Marion and Stephane Freiss is Gilles, a couple we first meet as they sit in a lawyer's office going over the final details of their divorce -- custody, finances, living arrangements. There is something off-putting about both Marion and Gilles; their ill-advised final tryst in a hotel room is a depressing finale to their marriage.
And yet, one has hope for these two. 5 X 2 is a film that plays with time, and the next chapter of the film offers a glimpse of Marion's and Gilles' married life together. It takes a moment for the viewer to realize that this is not an attempt to try again, but a snippet of the past. A gay couple comes over to Marion's and Gilles' house for dinner, and the conversation turns to sexual fidelity, secrets and lies.
The way Gilles tells Marion to rinse the dishes before she puts them in the dishwasher says more about their relationship than the conversation about monogamy.
Backward time goes again. Now Marion is giving birth to their child, and Gilles lacks the courage to join her in the delivery room. In fact, he runs from the hospital without seeing his wife. Marion's long-married parents fight horribly at the hospital and say dreadful things to one another. The suggestion is that longevity is not necessarily to be celebrated.
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Time changes again and now it's Marion's and Gilles' wedding day, a day that has its own set of betrayals. The last chapter of 5 X 2 is the story of how Gilles and Marion meet on vacation at a resort. Marion is there alone. Gilles is there with another woman.
Why these two are together and what separated them is never underlined, just hinted at, and much of the impact of 5 X 2 is in the eye of the beholder. Marion and Gilles are meant to be ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives. Each chapter of their time together is lighter and lighter in tone, as they and their relationship get younger and more hopeful.
The happy ending -- the beginning, that is -- almost wipes out one's knowledge of the sad and banal end to their story. Ozon has said 5 X 2 is his version of Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, although in his focus on these everyman characters, Ozon's is the more depressing film.
5 X 2 is clever and fascinating, but it's ultimately a downer. This is a bleak commentary on relationships and on men and women in general.
Not exactly the feel-good movie of the week.
(This film is rated 18-A)