In “The Five Devils,” her beguiling and exquisitely crafted latest, French director Léa Mysius furthers the ideas of adolescent self-discovery and extraordinary perception that drove her riveting début film, “Ava,” even as she introduces new elements of supernatural intrigue and intergenerational trauma to her cinema.
Whereas “Ava” set a coming-of-age story across one ephemeral summer, as experienced by a teenager soon expected to go blind, “The Five Devils” (now in theaters, streaming on Mubi May 12) finds Mysius and co-writer Paul Guilhaume, also the film’s director of photography, casting their gaze back through time to tell a story about the painful family secrets guarded by a young mother (Adèle Exarchopoulos, “Blue is the Warmest Color”) and the magical ability that empowers her child (Sally Dramé) to uncover them.
With a heightened sense of smell, eight-year-old Vicky is able not only to identify various scents but also, upon collecting them in jars, to directly experience the memories they evoke for others. Her mother, Joanne, once a champion gymnast, now teaches water aerobics at the local pool, going through the motions of a life more limited than she’d believed herself bound for. Vicky is capable of smelling out, from a distance, both the chlorinated pool water that clings to Joanne’s journals and the coffee with which she absent-mindedly stained one of its pages.
When her father, firefighter Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), allows his long-absent sister, Julia (Swali Emati), to stay with the family, Vicky is distrustful of her reasons for visiting, especially because she can sense Julia’s mysterious emotional connection to the new arrival. Bottling her scent, Vicky is transported a decade into the past. There, the sexual tension between Joanne and Julia is clarified, along with the communal air of homophobia and racism that once clouded their dynamic and precipitated a fiery accident, which left another gymnast (Daphné Patakia, “Benedetta”) disfigured and led to Julia’s exile from the village. For Vicky, who is multiracial and endures bullying at school, this hidden past holds the key to discovering the circumstances of her birth and intuiting, without being told, the interpersonal tragedies that befell the adults in her life.
Filmed, like “Ava,” in rich-textured 35mm, “The Five Devils” shrouds its queer melodrama in an otherworldly atmosphere, imposing mountains and freezing lakes shot with an uncanny and ephemeral chill that amplifies the subtle, often mystically complex performances of the actors (also including Patrick Bouchitey as Joanne’s loving yet homophobic father). Cleverly placed needle drops, including a memorable use of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” extend the film’s passionate aesthetic and give voice to the long-unspoken desires of its characters.
On the eve of its release, nearly a year following its premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Mysius spoke to The Playlist via a translator about finding the story of “The Five Devils” and crafting its sublime atmosphere of magical realism.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Translations by Lilia Pino Blouin.
There’s such an evocative sense of place to “The Five Devils.” I’m curious to begin our conversation about the film there. Various elements, from the mountainous setting of this remote French village to the recurrent symbols of fire and water that move through the story, impart this near-mythological quality. How did you first conceive of telling a story in this way, and how did you consider the various tools at your disposal as a filmmaker for establishing an atmosphere of magic realism?
This happened over many different stages and layers. We can start with the script. The entire construction of the storytelling happened not just at the script level but also during the shooting and then during the editing. We’ve done a lot of work that way, with many different layers. We identified an equilibrium, the right balance, for this story, which needed to become more of a family story, almost naturalistic. It needed to be credible, but it needed to be so much more than that.
I think this fantasy-like aspect and fairytale-like component, or the genre element, started in the writing. I started off with the very first image, which was the image of a woman in front of a fire, screaming. I also wanted to have a little girl, who had a talent for smells, be transported into the past. In putting these two things together in writing while having a mosaic-like approach, little by little, the story took shape. I had the idea together with Paul Guilhaume, who is the screenwriter and also my cinematographer that the little girl would be physically transported in the parents’ memories. That’s when the film took on this fantasy-like component, and it opened up to becoming a genre film.
When that happened, we started to work at all different levels on the set, the image, and the sound. We wanted to make sure that a viewer could understand right away, from the get-go, that we were in a particular kind of ambience and mood. All of a sudden, anything could happen.
What was your approach to imbuing the film’s setting, these freezing lakes and imposing mountain peaks in particular, with this fantasy-like ambience, and how did that inform the characters you were creating?
Having mountains and this cold, claustrophobic world was something I really wanted as a reaction to my first movie, “Ava,” which was very open, bright, and sunny. In terms of making it mystical and mysterious, that’s difficult for me to answer because there’s a certain mystery to our own way of approaching directing and set staging. Of course, there’s a lot of work that goes into it, but that work is based on a gut feeling — on vision. When I arrive at a location, I know right away whether it will work or not, as if I have a certitude within myself that I wouldn’t be able to explain or put into words. It’s very personal to me. I allow my subconscious side to come out.
Of course, I collaborate with the entire crew and with, my cinematographer, and also with the production designer, [Esther Mysius]. They show me all sorts of ideas. In the beginning, I thought there was going to be something more straightforward in terms of the production design; they had an influence on me and pushed me more toward the genre film aesthetic. It’s great to work like that with team members. In terms of the sense of mystery emerging, it’s the result of a lot of work but also trusting in your own vision. When you are a filmmaker, you’re always making choices — choices and choices and choices. And if you start putting your brain into it, you can get sidetracked. It works out better for you, as a filmmaker, if you make those choices in an impulsive and passionate way. That’s my impression.
Trusting one’s vision is a theme across both “Ava” and “The Five Devils,” which directly explore sight and, more specifically, sensing without seeing — or without being told what you’re sensing so you see it clearly. While I can imagine, to a degree, it’s inseparable from your relationship with filmmaking, to what do you attribute this interest in sight?
These questions, in terms of knowing where something comes from, are complicated because it’s almost like a psychoanalytic approach. There’s something autobiographical. In any case, I’m going to try to answer as best as I can. Of course, I have this attraction for images, to what we can see or look at. I’ve had that forever. I used to be a photographer when I was younger, and I would write, but what I really liked was creating a world. What I find beautiful in cinema is that you create a world, and then you get to see it. It’s almost like a children’s game when you create something in your mind, and then you can suddenly see it in front of you. There’s also something psychoanalytical. I dream a lot. Dreams are important to me. And I like it when I’m in a dream or in reality, and then, all of a sudden; the gaze becomes something different. The images we see are all in our heads, so it’s a false gaze, in a way.
It could also be the fact that I do have some sight problems, though nothing major at all. Earlier, we mentioned my first movie, “Ava.” When I was little, I had surgery on my eyes. For a few days, I couldn’t see anything, but I glimpsed all these fluid images. I just couldn’t see anything [clearly] at all. Maybe this left a mark on me. Maybe there is this autobiographical side to it. It’s also connected to desire. That’s something I’m very interested in: desire. I have a feeling that desire goes through sight a lot. But then again, what do I know? In terms of what’s connected to magic, I find that very fascinating, like a lot of people and filmmakers do. To some extent, “The Five Devils” talks about cinema in some regards, as well.
