5x2


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"


5 x 2


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. 5x2 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. But 5x2 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. It is much more complicated than that, at least partly because the jinx turns out to have been there from the beginning: the dark spark of spiritual wrongness that ignites the whole unhappy tale.
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.
Was their hell inevitable? It is impossible to be sure. During the dinner party scene, Gilles and Marion play host to Gilles's brother, a middle-aged gay man; he has brought along his beautiful, carefree young lover who insouciantly declares that monogamy is unnatural and announces his intention to head off to a club later, alone. His older partner can only shrug and smile to hide his hurt. Something in the conversation triggers an undercurrent of recrimination between Marion and Gilles: one deliberately embarrasses the other by recalling an adulterous adventure at an orgy. Is it a fantasy? An embellishment? A reality? Whatever the truth, just talking about it looks like revenge for a preceding crazy act of infidelity, which the other has (probably) discovered in a missing scene. It is only the latest link in the daisy-chain of anger.
Marion and Gilles are all too human, and their lives are a mess - a mess in which apportioning blame is futile, but a part of trying to make sense of what has happened. Shown in the correct time-order, the movie would not have the same savour; neither, paradoxically, would it make as much narrative sense. The back-to-front motif is of course familiar from novels like Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, with the Nazi doctors "curing" their experimental victim-patients in reverse, and the celebrated fantasy-passage in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in which the bombers move backwards over Dresden, sucking up the fire-bombs. There is also Pinter's Betrayal and Gaspar Noé's rape-revenge nightmare Irréversible. 5x2 offers something different from the obvious irony of causal inversions, and its subtleties and complexities are a world away from Noé's brutal shocker. But Noé's title is very much to the point here. The future of Marion and Gilles is to be poisoned by one irreversible act of folly, the kind of bad choice anyone can make, and never unmake, and whose effects and sequels dominate the remainder of a life.
The director that did come into my mind watching 5x2 was actually the Australian claymation specialist Adam Elliot, some of whose short films were shown in the UK last year. One featured a little old man who, looking back at his life, is confronted with an awful thought: "You can only understand your life backwards. But you have to live it forwards." We all behave as if we know what our lives are about - for all the world as if we could see them whole from first to last, as if we were not plunged sightlessly into the middle of the action. Ozon's film shows us the pain and the exhilarating futility of hindsight, of knowing the truth about something after it is over, and even then not being completely sure that there is not more retrospective illumination to come. This is a deeply impressive film from Ozon, who, at only 37, is moving to a new level of technical and creative mastery as a director.


anguish- udręka, cierpienie
apportion- rozdzielać (pomiędzy)
coagulate- krzepnąć, ścinać się
conjure up- wyczarowywać
core- sedno, jądro, rdzeń
daisy-chain- seria wydarzeń
deterioration- pogorszenie
disinterment- ekshumacja
duel- pojedynek
embellishment- upiększenie, przyozdobienie
enactment- gra; postanowienie
folly- szaleństwo
futile- jałowy, bezowocny
hindsight- analiza zdarzenia po fakcie
ignite- zapalać się, powodować wybuch
inevitable-nieunikniony
infidelity- niewierność
insight- wgląd
insouciantly- beztrosko, bez zaangażowania
intact- nienaruszony, nietknięty
interleave- przekładać (czymś)
irreversible- nieodwracalny
jinx- pech
piquant- pikantny
plunge- wpadać, nurkować, zanurzać się
recessive- recesywny
recrimination- wzajemne obwinianie się
repair to- udawać się do
savour- smak; aromat
shrewd- przenikliwy
stomp out- wychodzić ciężźkimi krokami; stomp- ciężko stąpać
stratum (l.mnoga:strata)- warstwa, pokład
stunning- wspaniały, oszałamiający
subsidiary- pomocniczy, dodatkowy
turn out- okazywać się
unflinching- niezachwiany
valedictory- pożegnalny

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