Film Review: The Woman In The Fifth (15)

IT’S been seven years since Pawel Pawlikowski wowed the Edinburgh International Film Festival with the premiere of My Summer of Love.

His stars, Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, both moved on to greater things, but the Polish director vanished from film-making after the tragic death of his wife in order to look after his young family. It’s hard not to root for a triumphant return with The Woman In The Fifth, based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy.

American academic and writer Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) arrives in Paris after some messy scandal back home in America. He hopes to reconcile with his wife Nathalie (Delphine Chuillot) and resume his relationship with their daughter (Julie Papillon) but Nathalie is having none of it, and shortly afterwards he is robbed on a bus of his wallet and other belongings. Now he’s stranded in Paris with only a “France Aujourd’hui” grasp of the language.

In exchange for bed and board at a scuzzy hotel whose occupants seem to be strangers to the flush toilet, Tom takes on the job of night guard at a warehouse which houses legally dubious operations. This is supposed to tide him over until he can get himself sorted out by asking someone to send him some cash.

His only refuge apart from the tavern is Margrit (Kristin Scott Thomas) a mysterious woman who lives in the fifth arrondissement and offers not just sex but artistic inspiration. She may even be a product of his imagination. Then things become even more paranoid with sinister images of insects and spiders, and then more overt violence when Margrit seems to be connected to a series of murders

The Woman In The Fifth is a slight piece, yet it isn’t without psychological pull. Paris on the other hand, like the Margate of Pawelowski’s The Last Resort, has never seemed less alluring. Pawlikowski is good at establishing an unsettling atmosphere and, as in My Summer Of Love, makes a loosening grip on reality look plausible and even inviting. Like Polanski’s The Tenant or Knife In the Water, this film keeps the audience off-balance but eventually isn’t so much enigmatic as muddled and unsure where it’s going.

And even if she may be a product of an academic’s imagination, does a vamp have to ring so many familiar bells that it’s a struggle not to alert the cliché police? Scott-Thomas is a great actress but she’s a control freak playing a possible basket case, and although the film is 85 minutes long, that paradox barely reaches the end of the movie alive. «

Siobhan Synnot

Filmhouse, Edinburgh, from Friday