FILM

France/Poland/UK 2011 84 mins Dir: Pawel Pawlikowski Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas, Ethan Hawke, Samir Guesmi, Joanna Kulig, Delphine Chuillot

An American man arrives in Paris, announcing that he's come to live with his French wife and raise their daughter. When he turns up at her apartment, however, she looks terrified, tries to prevent him coming in, and calls the police to report a breach of a restraining order. It's a promising start to Polish-born Brit director Pawel Pawlikowski's belated follow-up to his excellent 'My Summer of Love'. But this adaptation of US author Douglas Kennedy's novel never really gets out of first gear, setting up several mysteries but delivering only a dreary and unrewarding meditation on paranoia and madness, filled with laboured insect/wood/owl symbolism, that only the most charitable would describe as Kafka-esque.

The American is literature professor and novelist Tom Ricks (Hawke). He's subsequently robbed of all his possessions and winds up in a squalid room at a run-down hotel, whose dodgy proprietor Sezer (Guesmi) offers him employment to pay for his accommodation. It never seems to occur to Ricks to contact his bank or the US Consulate. The job is night watchman at a mysterious warehouse filled with weird noises and what appear to be streaks of blood. Meanwhile, he feuds with a hostile neighbour over toilet etiquette, unwisely has it off with Sezer's polish barmaid girlfriend (Kulig), and becomes entangled with glamorous translator Margit (Scott Thomas), who lives in a swish fifth arrondissement apartment (hence the title).

Twists then suggest that Ricks might be a few chapters short of a novel. But it's all rather tiresomely sub-Polanski, with more attention played to mood than coherence. One suspects that only the film's brevity will forestall a stampede for the exits by loss-cutting arthouse punters with an eye on closing time. (Robin Askew)

Website: http://international.memento-films.com/now/the-woman-in-the-fifth

Opens: 17 Feb

Copyright Robin Askew 2012