Watching a thriller requires a certain willingness to be a dupe. The whole idea is to give yourself over, and the ideal is to find yourself moving from scene to scene – as if you were cautiously exploring the rooms of a very mysterious house — asking, “And then what?” In the Paris-underworld thriller The Woman in the Fifth, director Pawel Pawlikowski is skillful enough to keep you wondering, from scene to scene, exactly what that what is going to be, and I was with the movie every step of the way, right until the final credits began rolling – at which point I realized that the whole thing made no sense whatsoever, and that none of my nagging questions about what the hell was going on would ever be answered. There’s a distinction to be made between being a dupe and being had.
I know, I know, I’m being way too literal – The Woman in the Fifth is one of those movies of the “It was only a dream!” variety, designed to tickle our imagination as we ponder the distinction between what’s real and what’s only illusion. Some “It was only a dream!” movies work beautifully — The Wizard of Oz is one of them; Femme Fatale is another. But The Woman in the Fifth leaves a tantalizing trail of breadcrumbs only to lead us to…one last breadcrumb. I enjoyed watching Kristin Scott Thomas shimmer through the picture as a sultry viper woman, and I felt a kind of embarrassed tenderness for Ethan Hawke as his character tried to express himself in stubby blurts of bad French. But by the end, I only wished I had some stinky cheese rinds to throw at them.
That may be less their fault than Pawlikowski’s. (Pawlikowski adapted the screenplay…
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