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IMDbPro

La femme du Vème

  • 2011
  • R
  • 1h 24m
IMDb RATING
5.3/10
7.3K
YOUR RATING
Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas in La femme du Vème (2011)
A college lecturer flees to Paris after a scandal costs him his job. In the City of Lights, he meets a widow who might be involved in a series of murders.
Play trailer1:56
2 Videos
13 Photos
DramaMysteryThriller

A college lecturer flees to Paris after a scandal costs him his job. In the City of Light, he meets a widow who might be involved in a series of murders.A college lecturer flees to Paris after a scandal costs him his job. In the City of Light, he meets a widow who might be involved in a series of murders.A college lecturer flees to Paris after a scandal costs him his job. In the City of Light, he meets a widow who might be involved in a series of murders.

  • Director
    • Pawel Pawlikowski
  • Writers
    • Douglas Kennedy
    • Pawel Pawlikowski
  • Stars
    • Ethan Hawke
    • Kristin Scott Thomas
    • Joanna Kulig
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    5.3/10
    7.3K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Pawel Pawlikowski
    • Writers
      • Douglas Kennedy
      • Pawel Pawlikowski
    • Stars
      • Ethan Hawke
      • Kristin Scott Thomas
      • Joanna Kulig
    • 62User reviews
    • 100Critic reviews
    • 57Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 2 nominations total

    Videos2

    Theatrical Version
    Trailer 1:56
    Theatrical Version
    U.K. Version
    Trailer 1:53
    U.K. Version
    U.K. Version
    Trailer 1:53
    U.K. Version

    Photos12

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    Top cast24

    Edit
    Ethan Hawke
    Ethan Hawke
    • Tom Ricks
    Kristin Scott Thomas
    Kristin Scott Thomas
    • Margit
    Joanna Kulig
    Joanna Kulig
    • Ania
    Samir Guesmi
    Samir Guesmi
    • Sezer
    Delphine Chuillot
    Delphine Chuillot
    • Nathalie
    Julie Papillon
    • Chloé
    Geoffrey Carey
    Geoffrey Carey
    • Laurent
    Mamadou Minté
    • Omar
    • (as Mamadou Minte)
    Mohamed Aroussi
    • Moussa
    Jean-Louis Cassarino
    • Dumont
    Judith Burnett
    • Lorraine L'herbert
    Marcela Iacub
    • Isabella
    Wilfred Benaïche
    • Lieutenand Coutard
    Pierre Marcoux
    • Lawyer
    Rosine Favey
    Rosine Favey
    • Lawyer's Translator
    Anne Benoît
    Anne Benoît
    • Teacher
    Grégory Gadebois
    Grégory Gadebois
    • Lieutenant Children Unit
    • (as Grégory Gadebois de la Comédie Française)
    Donel Jack'sman
    • Customs Officer
    • (as Donel Jacks'Man)
    • Director
      • Pawel Pawlikowski
    • Writers
      • Douglas Kennedy
      • Pawel Pawlikowski
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews62

    5.37.3K
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    Featured reviews

    8tomsview

    The woman in the mind

    If you enjoy a movie with loads of atmosphere that leads you deeper and deeper into a complex mystery, and then refuses to give easy answers, then you will love "The Woman in the Fifth" - I know I do.

    An American writer, Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke), arrives in Paris to try to meet with his daughter. His ex-wife immediately calls the police and we realise that there has been some ugly history between them.

    Broke, Tom is given a room in a seedy hostel in exchange for taking a job as a nightwatchman in the basement of a strange building. At a literary gathering he meets Margit Kadar (Kristen Scott Thomas). Margit lives in the fifth arrondissement - the woman in the fifth - and they have an affair. His life starts to take unexpected turns. At the hotel, he also has an affair with a young Polish waitress, and a confrontation with the aggressive man in the next room. All the while, trying various ways to see his daughter.

    By the end of the film there has been a murder, a kidnapping, and revelations about Margit Kadar that reveal that all is not right with Tom Ricks. Not much is explained at the end - the last scene leaves us wondering.

    Movies that blur the line between what is real and what is being imagined have been around for a while now. Back in the days of Film Noir it usually turned out that it was all just a dream - a not too satisfying resolution that quickly became trite. However, over the last couple of decades, movies that blur the line have become much trickier.

    The process in more recent times may have started with movies that are not exactly ghost stories, but feature people who don't know they are dead. A forerunner was "Carnival of Souls" in 1962, but Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense" wasn't the only one to see dead people, they popped up in "Jacob's Ladder", "The Others", "Passengers", and "November" to name a few.

    Then there are the split personalities - the cinematic interpretation of schizophrenia. David Lynch's films, "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr." come to mind. Then there is "Fever", "A Beautiful Mind", and the recent "I, Anna" as well as "Trance", which have explored this phenomenon. "The Woman in the Fifth" belongs with this group.

    Although that tricky shift between the real and the imaginary has probably been seen a few times too often now, "the Woman in the Fifth" does it well. This intriguing film has an affecting central story, a fascinating location and compelling performances all round.
    7gradyharp

    A Labyrinth of Question of Fantasy and Reality

    Douglas Kennedy's perplexing novel THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH has been further contorted by writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski for the film of the same name (aka La femme du Vème). If the viewer has read the novel then the confusion of the story will not be as surprising as it is to the novice viewer. In many ways this is a brilliant cinematic exploration of the fragility of the human mind, how events of the past can influence the manner in which we attempt to reconstruct a viable present. But in other ways this is a film that refuses to tell a story that is logical and will leave many viewers with some serious head scratching by movie's end.

    Academic professor of literature and writer Tom Hicks (Ethan Hawke) seems to be fleeing America in the wake of a scandal simply because he wants to see his six-year-old daughter Chloé (Julie Papillon): Tom's estranged wife Nathalie (Delphine Chuillot) refuses to let Tom see his daughter, has a restraining order in place and seems fearful of Tom's character (it is suggested that Tom may have been in prison for the past six years). The police are called and Tom escapes onto a bus, falls asleep and s awakened at the end of the line having been robbed of this luggage and money. He is in the sleazy part of Paris inhabited by North Africans and Moroccans and finds a degree of solace in a tiny café, the beautiful Polish waitress Ania (Joanna Kulig) offers him coffee and introduces him to the owner, Sezer (Samir Guesmi) who allows him to room in the filthy place, an offer that is accompanied by a 'job' where he will be a night watchman in a warehouse visited by shadowy figures who must give a code for Tom to allow entry. Tom uses his night jobsite to write lengthy letters to Chloé and spends his days spying on her at her school. At a bookstore he meets a fellow American who invites him to an evening reception for writers and there he encounters the very strange Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas), a bewitching but enigmatic widow of a Hungarian writer who is obviously attracted to Tom and sets meeting times and places for them to engage in a tryst (in the Fifth Arrondissement). Tom and Margit begin a tempestuous physical affair but at the same time Tom and Ania have an equally passionate affair and there is always in the background Tom's obsession to reunite with his daughter. But the story implodes with a murder, a disappearance, and a very strange change in the veracity of Margit's existence. It is at this point that the film becomes purposefully deranged and bizarre and the audience is left with merely some ideas and clues as to what has really happened. How are these incongruous events to make sense? Can they make sense? Is Tom succumbing to the same fever that kept him sheltered for many days upon his arrival in beautiful Paris? Has time somehow passed him by or is he living in an even grander deceit than he first thought?

    The film is basically in French with English subtitles. Ethan Hawke struggle with the French but that is credible for a 'just arrived' American. Kristin Scott Thomas offers her usual excellent skills as the strange Margit and the remainder of the cast do well with what little dialogue they are given. The dank atmospheric cinematography is by Ryszard Lenczewski and the correctly strange musical score (from an aria form a Handel opera sung by a countertenor to piano music excerpts form the Romantic era) is the work of Max de Wardener. Pawel Pawlikowski's moody, menacing, downbeat film takes something from the director's Polish compatriots Polanski and Kieslowski. It is offbeat but for those who appreciate experimental cinema this is well worth your time.

    Grady Harp
    6secondtake

    A gorgeously filmed mess--compelling and almost unfinished in feeling

    The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

    Well, the reason this movie gets some pretty awful reviews is the utter confusion of the plot. And yet it's a deliberate confusion--which is no excuse. It just means this isn't quite bad filmmaking, but a bad decision or two taken too far.

    You see, the main character, played with ease and almost familiarity by Ethan Hawke, is mentally unstable. He seems to have two distinct realities, and these are easily confused by the viewer. And in one of these realities he does terrible things, though it isn't clear because we see those terrible things as innocently as he does (which is to say, not at all, it seems).

    The character, Tom Ricks, is an American in Paris, a writer ostensibly in town to find and visit his daughter. But the mother's reaction to his showing up at their house is the first clue that something is wrong. This seemingly smart and very nice fellow scares her to call to the police. We see Ricks run to save himself from arrest but we don't quite know if he's to blame or if the mother is just overreacting.

    The fact is the confusions in the movie are overwhelming. Maybe there was a better logic somewhere that an editor, under pressure from a producer or distributor, made much out of. Or maybe it was an artful decision to leave us bewildered, to spend time and emotional energy gathering the pieces and clues. The director, Pawel Pawlikowski, has something of a success or two behind him and so might have pretensions that got the better of things here.

    In a way, the movie is better than it's overall impression by the end. There are numerous scenes that show a modern Paris very far removed--and much more revealing--than the glorified city seen in both mainstream French movies and American love letters like Woody Allen's recent time-travel. And the acting is overall restrained and convincing. In its bones, this is a substantial movie. Most of all, the cinematography is superb, some of the best creative stuff I've seen recently, dependent not on creative editing but on smart visual seeing--framing, kinetics, focus, and so on. I think you could watch it on many levels with great pleasure if you knew ahead of time the overall meaning and plot were going to be a mess.

    Without forewarning, I'm guessing it leaves mostly frustration and bitterness.
    5gbill-74877

    Lots of talent, but doesn't come together

    Despite the promise of a collaboration between Pawel Pawlikowski, Ethan Hawke, Joanna Kulig, and Kristin Scott Thomas set in Paris, this film fizzles into a frustrating, rather dreary mess. In a nutshell, an American writer (Hawke) shows up at his ex-wife's apartment, hoping to see their daughter. She calls the police on him and he flees, and after being robbed on a train, he ends up in a seedy hotel. He takes a shady job to pay for his room, and gets involved with a couple of women, one of whom was the muse for a Hungarian author (Scott Thomas), and another who works at the hotel (Kulig). Things go south when a man trying to blackmail him turns up dead, and the muse (who is also his alibi for the evening in question) turns out to be imaginary.

    The meaning to the film is probably along the lines of an artist struggling with his own sanity, and having to make difficult choices between creative output and family, all while living in impoverished conditions. He tries to write beautiful, touching work but he's doing so in the dingiest of places, the struggle of which has been felt by a large number of artists since time began. While Kulig and Scott Thomas felt rather wasted in their parts, Hawke shows his range here and has several fine moments, which were the highlights of the film.

    Where it falls down is in the narrative, which is too vague and open-ended. I disliked the muse reveal, and thought the murder was an odd bit of drama, things that sent the story over the rails for me. I wondered about what had led to the restraining order which was alluded to early on, and wished that the film had focused more on the dynamic with his ex-wife and child, as opposed to the other women in Paris. How much of this is in the imagination of the author is subject to interpretation and that's kind of interesting, but ultimately it just doesn't come together.
    7johnklem

    Moments of brilliance in another Paris

    A phenomenally ambitious, mostly successful film that (almost) atones for the cardinal sin that was Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. It says so much about cinema audiences that Midnight in Paris was so popular. Here's a film that is startlingly beautiful, utterly intriguing and perfectly cast, and with a drop dead gorgeous soundtrack. The result? A lot of very angry people because... it didn't make sense. No-one mentions that the "Midnight" script had holes you could drive a truck through, because they had a good time. Wake up, people! You're getting the cinema you deserve and it ain't pretty. Or maybe it is. How about Mark Wahlberg and a teddy bear? There you go. That works. Don't blame Hollywood (where I live and work). You're voting with your wallets. Films like The Woman in the Fifth that need intellectual and emotional input from its audience are being stoned to death. The world's becoming a Disney theme park and you're all accessories after the fact. If you think that the word "consumer" is an insult, there's still hope. Take a moment. Watch this film. It isn't perfect. The balance between physical and metaphysical is off and therein lies the confusion. Kieslowski (another obvious comparison) would have handled it better but he wasn't hampered by a literary source when he made La Double Vie. But... it's fKKKing gorgeous. Difficult, challenging, flawed? Yes, but I'll take it over the processed pap that is the American mainstream anytime.

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      This is the second film where Kristin Scott Thomas washes the hair of the main character. The first was "The English Patient".
    • Connections
      Featured in The Big Picture: February 2012 (2012)
    • Soundtracks
      Tomaszów
      Written by Julian Tuwim

      Performed bz Ewa Demarczyk

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    FAQ

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • November 16, 2011 (France)
    • Countries of origin
      • France
      • Poland
      • United Kingdom
    • Official sites
      • Official site
      • TVP VOD
    • Languages
      • English
      • French
      • Polish
    • Also known as
      • The Woman in the Fifth
    • Filming locations
      • 131 Rue des Poissonniers, Paris 18, Paris, France(Au bon Coin bar and hotel)
    • Production companies
      • Haut et Court
      • Film4
      • UK Film Council
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $113,800
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $33,011
      • Jun 17, 2012
    • Gross worldwide
      • $662,887
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 24 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby Digital
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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