Review No.56: The Woman in the Fifth

Continuing along the French theme for my next review we have The Woman in the Fifth starring Ethan Hawke as a writer who journeys to Paris in order to reconnect with his daughter. If this format sounds familiar then it's because we've previously seen Hawke in Paris as a writer in Before Sunset however this has none of the joy or romance that that film possessed. Instead Hawke things it will be easy to get access to his daughter despite his ex-wife taking out a restraining order against him, it's left up to us to decide why exactly, then he is robbed so has to beg for a room above a cafe. The proprietor of the establishment is a dodgy gangster type who gets him a job as a sort of sercurity guard at a warehouse in which we are meant to believe that unsavoury action is afoot. Despite Hawke being a bit of an idiot he still seems to attract the women from the Polish waitress who works at the cafe to Kristen Scott Thomas' author's widow who is instantly taken with the tortured writer character that the lead actor portrays. Things plod along at a snail's pace until suddenly in the last twenty minutes of this eighty minute film we have gruesome murders, Hawke's child goes missing and there's a revelation about Kristen Scott Thomas' character's identity.

In terms of The Woman in the Fifth it was all a bit too little too late and it was as if director Pawl Pawilkowski had an idea of how he wanted to end the film but didn't really know where to start. As I have been alluding to I really never took to Hawke's character and indeed don't think he should be able to lead a film on his own as I find he is better when he is part of ensemble or at least has a regular co-star to bounce off. The first half of the film is incredibly dreary while the second half speeds up so much that it feels like a different film entirely just with the same actors. There are a lot of caricatures in the supporting cast including the gangster, the overbearing rapper and the sensitive waitress. On the plus side Kristen Scott Thomas is always watchable but she is wasted here on a character that changes so much that it's hard to sympathise with her or even understand her. The Paris landscape is also beautifully captured by cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski so everything looks great but that's where the praise ends I'm afraid.

Verdict: A film that goes from dreary to over-complicated with a very uninvolving leading man at least is good to look at and features the always reliable Kristen Scott Thomas so far that reason I will award it a generous 5/10