The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

Fantastic!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Mr. World? Where are you? Are you full of life? Are you full of grief? What is thine disposition? The writer holds the gate to the world. He opens the gate to the inner society of the mind. Writer! Tell us what is wrong with the world. We want to know. Is it in harmony? Is a dark encroaching fog about to envelop us all? Mr. Writer...tell us what's wrong with your world.....Express your inner torment...share it. We want to feel it to. We want to know we aren't alone in our suffering. Tell us....what is in that room...that room that no one is allowed to go in. The thing I like best about this movie is it doesn't try to do too much. It's very low-key. The symbolism is very strong but it doesn't shove it in your face. I think you have to be an artist to get this.

The American professor of literature and novelist Tom Hicks (Ethan Hawke) travels to Paris to see his beloved daughter Chloé (Julie Papillon) that lives with her mother Nathalie (Delphine Chuillot). However, Nathalie uses the restraining order to call the police and avoid letting Tom to meet Chloé. Tom flees from the police and takes a bus but he is tired and sleeps. When he awakes in a poor neighborhood, he finds that his luggage and money were robbed. He goes to a bar and the Polish waitress Ania (Joanna Kulig) brings a coffee for him. He asks for a room and explains that he had been robbed and she asks him to talk with the owner Sezer (Samir Guesmi) that allows him to stay in a very low budget room and pay him later. Then Sezer offers a job of night watchman in a suspect building. One day, Tom goes to a bookstore and is invited to a party with writers where he meets Margit Kadar (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is a translator and widow of a Hungarian writer. She gives her address and telephone to Tom. Soon Tom has a love affair with Margit at her apartment and with Ania on the roof of the bar. But Tom is also obsessed by his daughter, snooping around Chloé during the days. When his next door neighbor at the hotel that is blackmailing Tom is found dead, his only alibi is Margit. But when the police officers go to her place, they discover that she had committed suicide many years ago."La femme du Vème" is one of those movies like "Triangle" where there is no explanation for bizarre and surrealistic situations. I am not sure whether the director Pawel Pawlikowski had this intention or not, but forget any explanation about the plot and simply enjoy (or not) the movie. David Lynch is the master of this style while Claude Chabrol was the French master of thrillers with open endings to make the viewer think and discuss possibilities. But this is the practically unknown Pawel Pawlikowski and I was disappointed with the lack of conclusion of the good plot. But as an unconditional fan of Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke, I do not regret this strange experience. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Estranha Obsessão" ("Weird Obsession")

You do not often get the opportunity to see such a beautifully crafted film. This film is seamless in the way it shows you what it chooses to show you. Genius cinematography! If you compare this film to mainstream cinema, of course you are not going to be happy. This film is not mainstream and its not trying to be. The way I see it is that everything you see and hear reflects exactly what someone living with psychosis or another severe mental illness would experience. The film has many similarities to "Black Swan" in that way. The entire 90 minutes of the film you are taken on a psychotic journey. Nothing makes sense. There are glimpses of normalcy and then everything goes back to chaos with no real conclusion. The story's journey mimics what it must be like to be in the psyche of the mentally ill.The dark shots, the cloudy skies and colourless rooms are all reflections of Tom's twisted psyche. A metaphorical dark hell if you will. My guess is that Tom is actually locked up somewhere. The images on screen are really a portrayal of Tom's distorted thoughts during the past 90 minutes while he stares blankly at the white walls that surround him.

There are films that pretend to be high art, and The Woman in the Fifth is clearly one of them. It insults your intelligence with its twists, because if a film were to suggest everything had happened in the protagonist's mind, then surely, why bother with this story when you can imagine everything yourself just by looking at the poster and watching the trailer. And surprisingly this is based on a novel written by Douglas Kennedy, so there should be a story at least, unless something went wrong with director Pawel Pawlikowski's adaptation of the screenplay.A French-British-Polish production, the film boasts the likes of Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas, the latter being the titular woman, a widow of a not-so-well read Polish writer. But she appears only about halfway through the film, and we're left to follow Hawke's Tom Ricks, an American English literature professor and writer of only one book, who had journeyed to Paris indefinitely so that he can stalk his estranged wife, and kid. That's because he has a restraining order, and has to keep a distance. He loses all his possessions, and ends up in a motel-bar, where the goodwill of the owner Sezer (Samir Guesmi) meant he could live on credit for the time being.One hour is spent together with Tom in getting into a routine. He mopes around trying to write, gets frustrated with his neighbour who has bad shared toilet manners, Sezer gets him a job which is a night guard equivalent of sitting in a windowless room screening people entering some premises that is never revealed to be what it is, and in between, he gets to physically romance Scott Thomas' Margit Kardar, who sets certain rules and conditions when and where they can get jiggy with it, and interchanges his muse to Sezer's squeeze Ania (Joanna Kulig) because she's obviously more nubile, and more impressed with his writing credentials than Margit.But it is this routine that does the film in, because it doesn't bother to lead the story anywhere. If Pawlikowski's objective is to bore, or put something existential onto film, then he succeeded, complete with dreary lines where Margit tells Tom the latter has to experience tragedy in order to write that next big novel. Right, so a translator for her dead husband's literary works suddenly becomes life's guru to a writer, and dispenses plenty of knowledge nuggets to her lover when he visits her periodically for one sole objective.It's one thing being open ended so as to make the audience work for the pay load, but another if things are kept open ended as a cheat because of the emptiness of the film, leaving it to the audience to guess in any fashion, without clear parameters drawn up because the filmmakers are clueless as to where they want the film to go. No amount of beautiful cinematography can cover up the lack of clarity, and to sugar coat the flimsiness, and silliness of the film, is but a futile effort. While Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke put in good performances, ultimately they are done in by their lines, and probably had an exercise on how to brood effectively for the screen.The twist could have been done in creepy fashion, since it blows open the possibilities just when things were turning rote and stale past the hour mark, but nothing was done to exploit this sudden window of hope. When it happened, it provided a temporary lift, but ultimately did itself in again by going for things that are inexplicable both logically and emotionally, and as mentioned, if everything can be imagined, then why the need to watch this in the very first place? Save your money for something else more worthwhile, as this stinker sinks to the bottom of the pile, not worth another mention unless to list down the worst of the year.