Reviewed by David Levinson

THERE IS no modern romance, owl-glassed luminaries and angular femmeboys yawn in time, but the cult of passion has merely been sublimated to a ghost in the machine: he blogged, she blogged, and the no-wow phenomenon of co-ordinated myspace profiles . Those who throw back “we’re just fucking” with lightning reflex do so less out of bohemian quixotism, and more in testament to love’s finite reserve. Meanwhile, a million faces simultaneously masked by dayglo apples isn’t a sign of unified isolation: Technology disciplines and diversifies, and beneath the toecap of social gate-keeping, we still eggsit visions of happiness.


What is rescinding, then, like a last haunted rabbit on the prairie, is marriage’s Final Solution. Call it a problem that’s ethical, national, or sociological, but in the case of Francois Ozon’s 5x2, it’s strictly temporal. Those who overestimate the power of symmetry (not surprisingly) have called on 2002’s critic-taser Irréversible as a reference point. True, both narratives reach around from mournful uncertainty to blissful serenade. Yet, the difference is that Irréversible falls harder to, and capitalises further on, the lashings of irony that accompany its retread through tragedy: Every idle bubble of happiness sags with murky inevitability. The total sum is a vision of chic nihilism, executed with all the high-tension of a Mercedes’ assembly-line: sinewy tracking shots leave almost no breathing room for the viewer, while just to rub in the formal assault, Noé caps off with a strobe light and the officiated bumper-sticker slogan, “Time Destroys Everything.”

But like the unfinished seam to Gaspar’s double-stitch, Ozon avoids the sense of scrutinising a past trapped in amber: Moments fumble off the cuff, picking up enough dirt to surmount the oblivion of education-reel 5-stepping. Take the first segment (i.e. the “end” of the story), which endures divorce as a knot of legal procedure. Cut off from any residual impression of love, the only souvenir of Gilles’ (Stephane Freiss) and Marion’s (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) coupling is a day-allocation for time to be spent with their kid. Yet in the scene that follows, they’re relocated to a bare motel room, she giggling painfully that “this is ridiculous” as he fumbles with her breast. They’re awkward like teenagers all over again, only the joy of discovery has been replaced by a strained overstepping; crossing territory that’s familiar but unresponsive, Gilles’ frustration warps into colonial destiny as he aggressively indulges in a lost frontier. More than just one last fuck however, the sex is almost ritualistic – a hand blindly run across love’s borders, unwilling to believe in its sudden terminus. Lost in this no-man’s-land, they fight in spite of a known outcome, for their own catharsis: Marion admits blankly that Gilles “wins,” as he accuses her of being happy to be in control and get laid. Leaving in disgust, the final shot finds her gliding through a maple corridor to the sound of a rattling chansonette.

When Marion accuses Gilles of “win[ning]”, she does it ironically, to shut him up. But in gut-level Darwinism, marriage is all about sectors of power, and player stats morph here with all the frenzy of overtime. When Gilles takes Marion in the motel room, it’s because he overpowers her, and we leave with a fairly secure sense of where sexual dominance lies – if there’s any air-born regret, it’s wiped-out by Gilles’ bad-cop callousness. Yet, while it would be easy to view this outburst as leaked frustration from the marriage’s ruin, it just as easily could be considered an embellishment of the dynamic that held the marriage in place: After sneaking out on the night of their wedding, and inadvertently falling into the hands of an American tourist, Marion may have felt that she owed Gilles. So when, later at a dinner-party, he relates his night of sanctioned infidelity – in which Marion watched him take part in an orgy – does she cry through the trauma of scopophilia, or because the subject breaches her own lost eve? Everything and nothing applies in this vision of coupledom as a live circuit-board of contradictions; living, breathing, and stubbornly flighty, all the creature comforts in the world won’t dam its inevitable falling apart, if it were meant to be. By treating time as open syntax, Ozon loosens the handcuff of a master narrative’s rose-blush romanticism; love doesn’t scale into some divine plateau, nor is its movement necessarily even linear. It ebbs and flows, and when it’s gone, it’s traded off like the wind. By revealing Gilles and Marion – from ashenly hopeful to nakedly obtuse –, Ozon confronts the morbid persistence of human hearts (and human loins) in the face of certain failure.