Five Times Two (2005)

People are voting emotionally.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

After watching three different Ozon's movies, from disappointing Regarde la meer, interesting Swimming Pool (with unexplained twists in the plot that resulted with endless threads on it's IMDb board similar to Lynch's movies, with posters trying to explain their own visions and explanations and compare it to others) and great 8 femmes, this movie is again returning me almost to the beginning.Unlike Swimming Pool this movie doesn't make me ask what has happened (or even who is who, what is a dream and what is reality) but what is the point, why was it made the way it was and finally why was it made at all.The problem of understanding the movie begins and starts with the time-line. I don't believe that movie must have a straight time-line, flashbacks are ancient movie figures, movies that start with end and then tell the story from the beginning as well. Drops of memory from forgotten past can be irritating, but sometimes, if making a point, they add special spice to the movie (i.e. Unknown). Sometimes even false flashback parts (intentional lies that the narrator or main character tells us, i.e. Usual Suspects, or uncontrolled hallucinations in coma, i.e. La boite noire) won't spoil but make a great movie in hands of great author. Moribund agony can be also shown as straight time-line that we believe is real till the last scene (Alice ou la derniére fugue) or almost random mix of reality and nightmares (Jacob's Ladder), giving us great experiences. Even combination of converging straight and reverse time-line, as an experiment, appeared to be a masterpiece (Memento). But all of these movies have a story to tell and a point that justifies the time-line interventions.We have a kind of reverse time-line in 5x2, but not complete (as if you take a movie from ending credits and play it backward). It is made as if somebody mixed the film reels (do you remember film reels? Movie was cut in several reels and once a reel ended a new reel had to be placed on the projector; if the theater was poor and had only one projector the audience had to wait till it was done) and showed it in reverse order.Once we get used to it (the title helps us and after third leap backward we expect that we have two more to come) it makes no problems. The problem appears when a long, long scene (two lovers swimming into the open sea) announces the end of the movie. If there was at least one single ending scene from "normal" time, that would encircle the story, or if there, at the most distant period, happened anything important for the later and final scenes, we could accept that this unusual time-line had a meaning. But I haven't seen anything to justify, let alone praise for the procedure.What is maybe the worst thing is the fact that 5x2 isn't a bad movie at all. If Ozon didn't play with time periods it would be a good, not too original but well played story about an unsuccessful relation/marriage from beginning to its end, presented through several important moments in their life. Yes, there was Bergman doing it and doing it much better, but how many Bergmans can one history have? Unfortunately, Ozon won't be remembered as a man who made his version of Bergman's tales, and if he'll be lucky he won't be remembered after this movie at all. In my mind he will stay an author of 8 femmes, movie that puts Coen brothers kind of plot into Tennessee Williams characters and background. (Interesting: Ozon wrote screenplay for all of those so different movies.)

Five episodes, told in reverse, of a couple's history. Almost from the start - in a magistrate's office, finalising a divorce - nothing is quite what it seems. Ozon's backwards story telling is enlightening, obscuring causality so that the episodes in the couple's life become case studies for their mature dinner-party conversation. The increasing warmth and charm of the couple is real in each sequence but becomes isolated from the story arc, suspended.I watched the film without a sense of pathos then. An hour in I wasn't thinking 'what a shame, they seemed so in love', for example, but rather, 'yes, that's roughly what it's like at that stage - does that tally with what they discussed earlier in the film?'. In each of the episodes is a peculiar event that is rather unusual in anyone's experience. Ozon really does want us to think about the strange, cumulative nature of love rather than just watch the handsome couple's experience played out on screen.And it is a handsome couple, in a classically French way: Stéphane Freiss (Gilles) is older, rather grizzled; his (ex-)wife Marion played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is youthful, appealing and unconventionally pretty (she also has a magnetically natural, sexy walk). Their performances are perfectly good although I think that they operate at the same rather detached intellectual level of the director. I admire the film but couldn't abandon myself to it. 5/10

A film that suggests a cross between Bergmans's gut-wrenching "Scenes From a Marriage" (1973) and Stanley Donen's more lighthearted "Two For the Road" (1967), mixed in a bit with that backwards "Seinfeld" episode, "5X2" (2005) is a very fine adult drama from director Francois Ozon. As the title suggests, it is comprised of five short glimpses at the doomed relationship of a handsome professional couple, Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stephane Freiss). As in "Two For the Road," we see unchronological snapshots of this couple's failing marriage, but unlike the '67 film, rather than being given scattershot scenes from various periods, here we proceed continuously backward in time: from the divorce settlement and its rather icky aftermath, backward to one of the couple's dinner parties, back still to the birth of their premature son, on to their wedding party (and a most unusual wedding night, to put it mildly), and all the way back to one of their first meetings. Our foreknowledge that the couple's marriage is doomed makes the cracks in Marion and Gilles' relationship stand out all the clearer. Consequently, the pretty, upbeat ending is rendered bittersweet at best, with our preglimpse of what their future holds. "5X2" has been finely put together and features sterling acting down to the smallest bit players. It was especially great for me seeing that grand old actor, Michael Lonsdale (who will always be Hugo Drax for us Bond fanatics), still acting at age 74, here playing Marion's father. My only complaint, really, concerning "5X2" is that it is a bit on the short and sketchy side; perhaps a few extra scenes would have enabled us to more fully understand the characters' motivations, particularly Gilles' (and especially his no-show at his son's birth). This, for me, is the only thing that prevents "5X2" from being a perfect 10.

It is worth seeing this film both forward and backward. It's interesting how it changes when you see the events "in order".*spoiler alert* When I first saw it, I was inclined to think that Gilles was a total ass and the cause of all the problems with the relation ship. After seeing it again, watching the scenes in backward order some points become clear that make some of his unforgivable actions less hateful.Clearly, he knows that Marion had an affair, and conceived from it. This is why he did not come the the hospital when she is giving birth, and why he left as soon as he see the baby.