5x2 Francois Ozon France 2005
A couple freshly divorced retreat to a grubby hotel room for one last post-conjugal act. The woman permits the dalliance to progress so far but then has second thoughts. The man forces the issue raping her. Showing us the end at the beginning is a typical narrative procedure that challenges one to explain how we got there, through the storyline, character development (or whatever else), often foxing one with the feints and twists that can lead the inconceivable into the inevitable. 5x2’s graphic immolation of a relationship, first legally then sexually, at the very start sets a vicious precedent that can’t be overcome only marvelled at; showing how a seemingly normal couple could degenerate into this state. Actors Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi (as Marion) and Stephane Freiss (as Gilles) do well running the emotional gulf between their characters having met and wishing they had never met.
5x2 is a similar Gallic exercise in reverse narrative form to Irreversible, telling the story arc of an ultimately broken relationship backwards in five separate episodes, but pales in its wake. Unlike Irreversible however, the continuity between each chapter is absent. We are shown key events in the relationship of the couple each separated neatly by years and divided by songs that could be refugees from a sundered once shared CD collection. Gaspar Noe’s dark nightmare took solace in an idyllic past, a park where viewers almost catatonic with brutality could shelter in some semblance of a happy ending. Similarly 5x2’s ending is also uplifting, showing in heartbreaking style the events that led the film’s subjects to start their romance. Together on a beach they swim out into the early evening and crushingly we’ve seen where it will all lead: marriage, birth, stagnation and divorce. The feelings this induces despite the mistakes made by either party is un-mistakenly touching and rapturously sad. Irreversible might be the nightmare you read about in the newspaper, 5x2 holds the kind of domestic events that could happen to you.
Picking one’s way through the five episodes presents a loose disjointing impression of themes and influences that wax and wane in both temporal directions throughout the years. Ample suggestion abounds to compose an argument about why they separate such as indiscretions on either side but owing to the discrete episodic structure of the piece much is left out. Marion is alluded to as being the victim suffering the rape at the end when she finally rejects Gilles and in earlier instances where her consent is less than forthcoming, or at the birth where Gilles fails to show up. Yet despite everything perhaps Gilles left because he couldn’t stand Marion using tooth-picks inappropriately. A feeble reason for leaving compared to the abuse admittedly. Any depiction on this scale has to leave bits out but 5x2’s singular events don’t quite gel sufficiently even with the actors’ strong performances and the endlessly pleasing more peripheral touches such as the recurring supporting cast each with arcs and tics of their own. We have the divorce, a dinner party, the birth, the wedding and how Marion and Gilles first met. Of these the dinner party is hardly as prominent a rite of passage even with the barbed disclosure.
As if to play with his jumpy structure in the penultimate segment Ozon has Marion peek in unseen on the wind-down of her wedding party, one more person with the audience spying on a prominent moment in someone’s life. 5x2 makes an audience play pathologist on the anatomy of a relationship to mixed effect, not quite overcoming the deliberate foresight which a film starting with a divorce hearing brings. Revelations occur throughout which may or may not be responsible for this outcome suggesting that the relationship was doomed continuously, not sufficiently undermining the final verdict despite the bold characterisation. So in a sense 5x2 is a victim of its own success.
