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 Stuck in the midlist with you The foreign language of "5x2"
The movie industry is just about in the place where book publishing
found itself at the end of the last century: the midlist is no place for
a filmmaker or film distributor to be.
Foreign-language movies, a mainstay of the art house in the 1950s and
1960s, influencing several generations of filmmakers, are as smart,
funny, entertaining and innovative as anything made in English. Film
festivals around the world play them. When even the best of them open in
the U.S. these days, however, the road is increasingly rocky. Miramax,
under Harvey Weinstein, who is launching a new company under his own
name, made money with certain feel-good pictures from other countries,
with a predilection for those about small, wide-eyed boys in search of
substitute fathers. Miramax spent ad dollars, something that the smaller
distributors, while likely to support a filmmaker through small-scale,
grass-roots efforts, are less likely to have.
Francois Ozon is French. The French film industry has a number of
cultural exclusions for the making and distribution of movies,
supporting an industry that would otherwise fail in that small country.
(The U.S. has a standard objection of this being an unfair "quota"
system that damages the chances of studio blockbusters within the
borders of France.) Ozon made a number of shorts with the support of
regional film funds, and nine features since, including the memorably
sinister "See the Sea" (1997), 2001's memory-and-loss gem "Under the
Sand," and the glossy musical goof of "8 Women" (2002). He's shown
himself quietly proficient in all that he's done. Even when a stab at
outrage like 1998's "Sitcom" doesn't congeal or the Fassbinder homage
(from a play by the late German director) of "Water Drops on Burning
Rocks" (2000) is too cold for most viewers, Ozon's work is never less
intelligent and always a little perverse in its view of sexuality. It
wouldn't be right to call him an intellectual, but his directorial
skills--performance, open yet precise framing, a sense of pace, a knack
for ellipsis--and his prolific output, suggest the kind of intelligence
that has seen a director like Claude Chabrol through fifty-seven
features to date.
In some ways, Ozon's profile is also like that of a midlist author of
books: three books, good reviews, middling returns, when are you going
to write your blockbuster? The penny-conscious "mini-major" might
sweat. While his previous movie, "Swimming Pool" (2003), was capably
(and expensively) supported by Focus Features in the U.S., his latest,
"5x2" is in equally proficient, but in less bankrolled hands.
THINKFilm, which is releasing "5x2," has dipped into distributing
foreign-language film, like the recent "Kontroll," but with far less
success than documentaries like "Spellbound" and "Mondovino." Mark
Urman of THINKfilm, a former publicist, is one of the sharpest and
eagerest quotes in the business, such as these reactions to a recent
piece about the decline of foreign-language box-office in the U.S. He
tells indieWIRE that documentary is perhaps "serving the function that
the foreign-language film used to. The profusion and proliferation of
viable, publicizable, innovative documentaries is obviously taking
business away from somewhere, and I think we're seeing fewer American
independent and foreign language films doing the business and having the
traction of what they've done before." Ancillary value is low, as
well, Urman added, with little chance of selling a foreign film to
television to help pay the movie's distribution expenses.
Which brings us to one screen at the Landmark Century starting on
Friday, one screen among seven, among many, many other screens in
Chicago, reliant largely on reviews, from weeklies and from dailies,
which, if the 37-year-old director's movie is lucky, will not be an
"Art House Review" or buried in the back of the entertainment section
next to the Gaming column or a two-week-old interview with Martin
Lawrence about how great it was working with kids on "Rebound." (Or
reviewers might simply say they thought it was bad and that they've seen
a lot of movies and this is a lot like some of the many movies they've
seen.)
"5x2" is essentially five short films telling one story. Ozon and
his usual co-writer, the novelist Emmanuelle Bernheim (who shares credit
on "Swimming Pool" and "Under the Sand") trace a marriage from end
to beginning, from divorce to happy meeting. It's been done, yes,
notably in Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," but the quiet, intelligent
synthesis that Ozon attempts is to tell each moment of the characters'
relationship in a different, appropriate style drawn from film history.
The opening segment, in which the divorce of Marion (Valeria
Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stephane Freiss) turns into a hotel-room
exchange that turns into dark, punishing sex, is, appropriately, modeled
after Ingmar Bergman: astringent, clinically framed, with spare decors
and built from snapped recriminations and self-hating tears. By the end,
there's the exchange of first glances at an Italian resort by the sea.
"On my set," Ozon's joked, "we're starting with Berman, we'll end
with Lelouch." (Claude Lelouch is the director of relentlessly goopy
stuff like "A Man and A Woman.") Reportedly, there was once a subtitle
to the film, "Or How To Live With Someone Else," an amusing idea, as
we don't see how they live together, only their moments of greatest
emotion--meeting, childbirth, marriage, divorce. There's a lot of
dangerous talk about the idea of infidelity, suggesting it's an
unnatural state for man, or an unnatural one for Ozon's protagonist, who
hints at other feelings. "Closer," of course, is a recent movie of
steely ellipsis and brimstone retribution, but Ozon seems to adopt a
more neutral stance, striving for a more enigmatic mood, a more
suggestive sense of how we live apart even when we live together. "5x2" opens Friday at Landmark Century.
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