5x2
2004 Drama / Romance
|
Credits
|
|
|
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 Write a review for this film... |
|
