5 x 2

The title of this film may make you think of photographs, which in the end is all that the characters, who once loved each other, have left.  And its end is in its beginning: director François Ozon, he of the particularly unshy approach to modern sexuality, shuffles the pictures in reverse chronological order so that we begin with the divorce of Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss).  Why they have come to this point after eight years of slow failure and a son that will keep them together until they die will be revealed in the other four vignettes to follow.  The monuments to their years – their divorce and parting shots, a dinner party where rather disturbing secrets are revealed, the birth of their child, their wedding night, and the gorgeous late afternoon beach on which they first meet – show us aspects of their personality that are unforgiving and mysterious, and never quite logical; which is, I may say, precisely the point of the exercise.  It is the point because we are not dealing with cardboard cutouts.  These are real people who not only do remarkably stupid and hurtful things but also come up with stupid excuses to justify themselves.  Marion and Gilles have known each other for about ten years, years they cannot have back and of which they will remember less and less owing to their separation.  If they had to file away times, forks in the path, when they chose wisely or (as is usually the case) unwisely, they might well select what we see of them.

And what do we see?  Marion has a face that suitors might deem classically beautiful, although it is neither one of those epithets.  But throughout it is morose, because early on in the relationship (late in the film) it is clear that Marion is not and perhaps cannot be content with her life.  The only time she is radiant and glowing sincerely is that first time as the film winds down, on a beach in a sunset that every person secretly wants as the backdrop to the story to end all stories, with a man who is handsome and apparently as interested in her as she is in that sunset.  The idealism of Marion, and her sobering encounter with the difficulties of making a relationship survive, reflect the downward spiral that seems inevitable because we know the end.  And because we know Gilles. 

Gilles is not what he appears to be.  Rather, he is not what Marion claims he is to herself, in her heart of hearts, and in that beach she holds dear in her memory.  Gilles has no particular interests other than business and pleasure, usually in that order, and could never be a shining knight or brave family man despite his efforts at both roles.  When he has his gay brother over for dinner in the second vignette, he speaks freely of a night of lovemaking that did not involve his wife.  Marion’s face in this scene is one of the film’s strongest images, one of mounting disgust as if she were vomiting with every feature of that classically beautiful face but her mouth.  That his brother is being used by a much younger man who has learned the bimbo trick of making older, less secure men trade the indulgence of your every whim for occasional affection reflects the cruelty of the world around the couple who has made it this far.  And because it is Gilles who is raping Marion in the first vignette, boasting of an orgy in the second then mysteriously absenting himself from the birth of their baby in the third, we can only conclude that Gilles is at fault and Marion is a victim.  But this legerdemain is just part and parcel of the structure, since the fourth vignette shows something about Marion that we might have suspected all along.

As mentioned elsewhere on these pages, the arguments against films with such gimmicks, to use an unkind term, is that were they to be straightened out like some stuffed viper they wouldn’t be particularly interesting.  They also, I should add, wouldn’t be those films.  5 x 2 thrives from your knowledge of what happened next but not why.  The situation, sufficiently banal, is given real pathos because we all know it will end badly and even suspect, aware of Ozon’s love of the macabre, that something truly horrific may have rendered the couple asunder.  Well, however revolting you find their behavior will depend on your tolerance for emotional cruelty.  I will say that female viewers may take a particular dislike to what Gilles does and doesn’t do, and what he chooses to say at some magnificently inopportune times.  This may reflect his inability to communicate with women or, perhaps, Ozon’s own fundamental lack of interest in elucidating those fragments and details that separate the prejudices that women have to endure daily from the coddling that men typically receive.  Without slipping into the symbolism of these basic beacons of man and woman, love and sex, and forgiveness and atonement, it is no surprise that some reviewers have likened Marion's sin to Eve's.  And that is the woefully sad part of this tragedy, this crude symbol for our own decay and nostalgia: Gilles is never given a chance to explain why he acted the way he did, and he is damned for it.  What if we had begun with the end and seen Marion happy and then very quickly disenchanted, would we think differently of Gilles?  Ah, but that would be a different film.

Russian Dolls

There are many metaphors for what all of us, in one way or another, seek from life.  Some may call it acknowledgement, others respect, yet the strongest word is still the best: love.   In a free and privileged world our encounters with love will be the product of our choices, not because we choose whom we love – there is, in fact, bountiful evidence to the contrary – but because for people who want to love and be loved everything we might undertake shapes and alters the possibilities of our passion (as a famous critic once said, whatever an alcoholic is planning for his day he is, in effect, simply planning his drinking).  It is therefore not surprising to see the industry of relationship advice bloom in the last century with the expansion of women's rights and the general abolition in privileged countries of arranged matrimony.  Which brings us to another conundrum: the freer we are to love whomever we'd like, the less we seem to know what to do about it.  Never in the history of mankind have we been allotted so much liberty in our mating and never before have we been plagued by so much indecision and doubt.   Despite the preponderance of half-baked suggestions that point towards love simply being a function of need and repressed desire, love is precisely what we do know.  Teenage infatuations notwithstanding, by the age of roughly our early to mid-twenties we will have gathered sufficient experience about what love is supposed to look, sound, and feel like that we will imagine a world in which our love is the most perfect, and from this unblemished sphere will be derived the one woman who is to replace all the other women that exist.  What percentage of us ever finds this woman?  A cynic would say zero; a skeptic might name a figure barely above that.  There will also always be those who claim that we are bound to impose our ideals on some poor, unknowing lass and disappoint both her and ourselves.  Yet there is another school of thought in which I occasionally swim, the school of revelation.  Revealed love, over time, over the course of a life seen at once forwards and backwards, the chance of eternity and immortal bliss, this is what we sense in every corner of our soul.  And the revelation of love is the fine metaphor in this film's title.

Our hero is a Frenchman by the name of Xavier (Romain Duris), a disarming and sensitive fellow as well as an aspiring novelist.  As opposed to the vast majority of the pretentious story lines featuring young artists, the film allows Xavier to be both sentimental and business-like in his decisions.  He opts to pen a few tawdry soap opera screenplays both for practice and money (a utilitarian sin of maturing writers since history's onset), all the while trying to finish his first novel and inspecting the world around him and the choices of his friends.  There is his ex-girlfriend Martine (Audrey Tautou) who has since gotten married, had a child and taken a responsible job to help the environment; William (Kevin Bishop), who has fallen in love with a Russian ballerina and even attempted to acquire the fundamentals of her language in order to woo her; Isabelle (Cecile de France), his lesbian friend and confidante; Celia (the late Lucy Gordon), a gorgeous actress whose biography Xavier has been commissioned to write; and then there is William's sister Wendy (Kelly Reilly), a spunky British redhead who keeps bobbing like a buoy on the lake of Xavier's regret.  What Xavier and Wendy will make of their relationship, which has obvious potential both physically and emotionally, is at the crux of the memories that engird him as he daydreams at William's wedding.  We go back in time with him, although time has been reshuffled to indicate a meaningful pattern, and we discover what he discovers. 

And what surfaces in six years of contemplation and regret?  It is always important to understand why we treat people a certain way, why we are friends with some and not others, and such insight can be gained through close scrutiny of our own mores.  If a person loves money and sex, he should not be astonished that he has little truck with his family and that his friends turn out to be a group of selfish hedonists who can never seem to quench their desires for pleasure; if security and his own personal space make him most comfortable, he will probably wake up one day and find himself completely and utterly alone.  Between these two easy and cowardly extremes lies the essence of our existence.  Xavier pursues Celia insofar as he understands that he can never have her; he looks at Martine, who is annoying yet principled and beautiful (a rare combination), and foresees a steady life devoted to the betterment of the planet and the plainness of his soul.  He travels as so many of us have traveled through the cultural paradise that is Europe looking for the face, the smile, the connection to end all connections.  Russia, as the other, the huge, looming and generally inimical beast that guards the most mysteriously gorgeous women the world has ever seen, becomes for him as a Frenchman an oddity, a disarrangement in his plans.  He looks at William, a simple lad who has always partied harder than anyone else, and sees a young man now intractably spellbound.  And he beholds this ballerina, perhaps in the classical sense the epitome of grace and idealized form, and sees a doll.  Yes, a doll.  The famous nested matryeshki that line every tourist trap in Russia, often with political leaders replacing the kerchief-garbed charwomen of the classic model, these now assume new meaning.  We all want to know, he muses philosophically standing in this famous St. Petersburg street, who that last and tiniest doll is, the one that is neither hollow nor contains anything apart from herself.  When do we end our search?  Would the results be any different were we Romantic souls not so enticed to circulate from wondrous European city to wondrous European city and gaze at every lovely young woman with a certain curiosity? 

While the details of Russian Dolls are hardly novel, the metaphor is both salient and extraordinary in its simplicity.  Duris has a middling command of English, which lends him a certain patheticness that is put to good use in emphasizing the fundamentality of his questions; he is, in other words, neither overly privileged nor overly gifted, and while not ugly, his appearance suggests warmth rather than gratification.  We are neither intimidated by his ability nor scornful of the success he does enjoy, especially with Celia, a witless stunner who leaves a bar when she fears to be seen only with him by some of her, ahem, hedonistic acquaintances.  That Celia would seduce her biographer so as to augment his retrospective affection for her (as well as her glory) is such a logical premise one wonders why it didn't occur to us from the very beginning.  But then again, if we knew everything from the beginning we might just peel off all the dolls but one.

Baudelaire, "Le vin de l'assassin"

A drinking song of sorts ("The assassin's wine") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

My wife is dead, and I am free        
To give myself to thirsty night!         
Yet when flat broke I'd seek alee,   
Her cries would rip my fibers tight. 

As happy as a king am I:                      
The air is pure, the heavens clear;           
Such was the joyful summer sky       
When I first loved my wife so dear! 

This horrid thirst that cuts me cold,
Can only be relieved with wine.
As much wine as a tomb will hold:
My grave, a massive pit of brine! 

An endless well I threw her down,      
And even sealed her fate that night 
With every stone from that high crown
Forgetting it all if I might!

In sermons of most tender vow,
Where nothing could rend us apart,
To lead through waves our love's bold prow,
So drunk on memory was my heart,

That I asked for a rendez-vous:
An evil eve; a darkened road.
And folly-stricken she came, too!
We all endure sweet folly's goad.

She was quite fine, a beauty spry
If tired now; and as for me, 
I loved her so, too much!  That's why
I bade her from this life to flee!

No one gets why, perhaps one blight,
Among this drunken, foolish crowd:
Could he have dreamt in morbid nights
Of turning wine to blackest shroud?

This blameless crook, as firmly safe
As iron cog with iron wheel;
Never would he in winter's chafe
Or summer's sun know love most real.

With black enchantment and black fears,
His cursed parade to panic's tune,
His vials of poison and his tears,
His rattling chains and mortal dunes!

And now I'm free, single once more!
Tonight dead drunk in my rebirth
Without cold fear or hot remorse,
I'll then lie down upon the earth.

And like a dog I'll take to sleep!
A chariot fast on heavy spoke;
With stones and mud it trudges deep,
This furious coach would gladly stroke

My guilty head into the sod
Or split me into equal parts! 
And I would mock, as I mock God
The Devil and Dee's Table charts!

Rimbaud, "Première soirée"

 A work ("First evening") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

Undressed was she, O how undressed,                           
As large and shameless trees appeared;                   
Each leaf a window pane caressed,      
With guile and O so near, so near.

Upon my chair she lay half-nude,            
Her white hands softly thus entwined;
Upon the floor, a coy étude:
Her little feet, so fine, so fine.

And I then saw, as bright as wax,
A hidden ray of light repose,
Which flitted in a smile's red tracks
And on her breast, a fly or rose.

I kissed her ankles, and so thrilled; 
A soft and brutal laugh she gave
And stretched in echoes of clear trills,
The lovely laugh of crystal cave.

As those small feet beneath her gown
Escaped, she quipped: "Won't you relent!"
The first bold move had brought no frown,
Just laughter feigning punishment!

And palpitating by my lip,
Her poor bright eyes I softly kissed;
Her vapid head began to slip
Far back: "So better now!" she hissed.

"Now sir, I must reveal this much" –
But then upon her breast I dived
With kisses matched to every touch,  
And laughter that was scarce contrived.

Undressed was she, divine, undressed.
As large and shameless trees did peer
In windows grazed by leaf's caress, 
To us they came so near, so near.

Preface to Les Diaboliques

The preface to this famous collection of tales authored by this Frenchman, as included in the first edition.

Here are the first six stories!

If the public bites and finds them to its taste, six more will then be published because in total they are twelve, twelve mistresses of sin!

Of course, with the title of Diaboliques, they could not possibly pretend to be a book of prayers or of Christian imitation.  They are nonetheless lush with true observation, however daring, and have been written by a Christian moralist who believes – and these are his own poetics – that great painters can paint anything and that these paintings are always both moral and tragic; from them will inevitably emerge the horror of the things they describe.  Only the impassive and the mocking are truly immoral.  And the present author, who believes in the Devil and in his influence upon the world, is not mocking anything at all and has no purpose in recounting these tales to those of pure soul other than to terrify and repulse them.

Once the public has read Les Diaboliques, I doubt there will be anyone who will wish to read it again, which is exactly what comprises the morality of a book.

That said as a matter of honor, we should answer another question.  Why has our author bestowed such a sonorous name upon these plain and dirt-strewn tales?  Is Diaboliques a bit too much?  Was the name chosen only for the stories included here or for the women at their core?

Alas, all these tales are true.  Nothing was invented or devised, we simply could not name the actual people involved!  They have been masked; and in these masks we can perceive the outline of their dresses.  "The alphabet belongs to me," said Casanova when he was reproached for not using his name.  The alphabet of novelists is the life of all those who have experienced passion and adventure, and it is only a matter of combining the letters of this alphabet with the discretion of profound art.  Moreover, despite the necessary precautions at the heart of these tales, there will undoubtedly be some among us whose attention will be attracted by the title Diaboliques, and who will not find them quite as diaboliques as they seem to boast of being.  They will expect inventions, complications, research, refinements, and all the shaking and trembling of modern melodrama (which is taking hold everywhere, it seems, even in the novel).  But these charming souls will be sadly mistaken!  Les Diaboliques are not devilries, they are truly "the diabolical," real stories of our progressive age and of a civilization both so delicious and divine that when we dare to describe them it always seems that they have been dictated by the Devil himself!  The Devil is like God.  Manichaeism, the source of the great heresies of the Middle Ages, might not be quite as stupid as we thought.  Malebranche said that God can be recognized by employing the simplest of means possible.  The same can be said of the Devil.

As for the women in these stories, why wouldn't they be the titular Diaboliques?  Are they not sufficiently steeped in diabolism in their own person as to deserve this gentle moniker?  Diaboliques!  There is not one of them here who is not diabolical to some degree; there is not one of them here whom we might seriously address with the words "my sweet angel" without fear of exaggeration.  Like the Devil – who was once an angel himself but fell irreparably – if they are angels then they are angels in his image, their heads lowered and the rest on high!  There is not one of them here who is pure, virtuous or innocent.  Monsters even, at least to some extent, they represent a collective of good sentiments and morality of precious little consideration.  Thus they could also have been called Les Diaboliques without really earning it.  We would have liked to create a museum of these ladies – as we wait for an even smaller museum of those ladies who are their counterparts and their foils in society, because all things come in pairs!  Art has two lobes just like the brain.  Nature resembles these women who have one blue eye and one black.  Here is their black eye in blackest ink, in the ink of those of easy virtue.

Perhaps later on we will publish something on their blue eye.  After Les Diaboliques, why not Les Célestes if we can find a blue of sufficient purity ...

But does such a color exist?

Jules BARBEY D'AUREVILLY

Paris, May 1, 1874