All marriages are a mystery to outsiders, they say. This superb new film from François Ozon, the director of Swimming Pool and Under the Sand, shines a light into one such mystery while somehow keeping its essential core of unknowability intact. 5×2 shows five scenes from a modern European marriage, in which love has coagulated into a poisonous duel. But everything happens in reverse order: we see its disintegration from the final calamity to its genesis, gaining a stunning insight into an ordinary middle-class couple, Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss). First, the divorce proceedings, then a tense dinner party, then the birth of the couple’s only child, then the wedding and finally the first meeting. The resulting film is a shrewd, compassionate and quite brilliant essay in the secret theatre of relationships.To travel backwards in time like this is piquant; it imitates the over-the-shoulder glance we give to our lives.Five Times Two 2004 Movie Download.
But 5×2 does not, in fact, tell us the whole story of Gilles and Marion: the five scenes are interleaved with four silences, missing chapters whose inferences we must fill in as best we can. It is almost like the disinterment of five discrete archaeological strata, under all of which there is yet more that cannot be discovered. Ozon’s film does not simply proceed from effect to cause, and solve a riddle in five recessive stages; neither does the mood lift progressively as the deterioration is reversed.5 x 2.
Marion and Gilles’s marriage has ended in a nuclear fallout of anguish. After their divorce is finalised, they repair to a cheap hotel room for what is evidently a pre-arranged valedictory sex session. It is almost too painful to watch: a horrible enactment of their dual, private hell. “It’s over. You won.” says Gilles, finally, before stomping out. The intensity and intimate despair that Ozon conjures up, and their subsidiary eroticism, have something of Bergman, but mixed up with something more contemporary, closer to the unflinching cynicism of Michel Houellebecq.