“The Five Devils,” from French director Léa Mysius, captivates from its very first seconds. We see Adèle Exarchopoulos in a sparkling gymnast outfit with other similarly dressed girls, all watching an enormous fire in the background; when she turns around, she is crying — fire, beauty, passion and death all conveyed in one image. But more striking than the themes that the shot conjures up are the many contrasts at play within it. Its wildly different textures, its colors ranging from the deep black of the night to the inviting sparkle of the costume, the aggression of the raging blaze contrasting to the vulnerability seen in Exarchopoulos’ eyes — all make this opening image incredibly rich and inviting.
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Few films at the festival are this formally rigorous or cohesive, and it is hard to believe that “The Five Devils” is a sophomore feature. Mysius, whose feature debut “Ava” premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week in 2017, raises the bar in terms of sophistication and style, on a visual level thanks to the work of director of photography Paul Guilhaume but also in terms of sound. The film’s opening montage beguilingly combines thumping beats and sharp strings, with the blue and yellow reflections of a lake and the gorgeous yet threatening landscape of the snowy French Alps. The director steers a tight ship and the film never lets up in terms of style, the score by Florencia Di Concilio making space for many flawlessly integrated and perfectly chosen pop songs throughout.
But what is the film about? That almost seems beside the point, mostly in a good way. Exarchopoulos plays Joanne, the mother of young Vicky (impressive discovery Sally Dramé). The opening images were in fact a dream that the little girl had about her mother, who works in a public pool and lives a very different life than that of a gymnast. After her work shift, Joanne likes to go for a swim in the extremely cold lake, and Vicky loves slathering her mother’s body with milking grease, an ointment that helps the body retain heat. The daughter then patiently waits until she has to call Joanne back to shore, once the safety threshold of 20 minutes in the water has been crossed.
It’s a strange routine, a daily aggression of the body that stands in sharp contrast with Joanne’s quiet, almost sullen behaviour at home. Her husband, Jimmy (the striking Moustapha Mbengue, discovered in Philippe Faucon’s “Amin” in 2018), is even more reserved, in contrast to Joanne’s father (Patrick Bouchitey). In this silent household, Vicky watches and roams, making strange concoctions in her room: unbeknownst to all, she has an incredibly powerful sense of smell, and knows how to gather the right ingredients to recreate the scents of any people or thing. When Joanne finds out about this gift, she is visibly disturbed, but already too concerned with other things to pay it much attention: Jimmy’s sister, Julia (Swala Emati), has come to stay.
Fiercely attached to her mother, Vicky senses her distress and tries to learn more about this aunt she had never met before, to better chase her away. But as she rummages through her things, she faints and her visions continue. What she sees then turns out to be true: images from her mother’s past, a decade ago, before Vicky herself was even born.
It’s a very compelling narrative device, the two timelines advancing in parallel as the past illuminates the present and vice versa. It is to Mysius and Guilhaume’s credit that things never get confusing, and on a purely narrative level, too, “The Five Devils” is a fine-tuned piece. That’s why it is such a shame that this awe-inspiring machine does not ultimately have any real emotional or thematic resonance. Part of this comes down to the nature of the forces at work in this story: if love and desire are always to some degree unexplainable, irrational, and inscrutable powers, they are even more so here, so powerful as to be uncontrollable and destructive. You can’t argue with this kind of passion. Unconditional, too, is Vicky’s love for her mother. And Exarchopoulos is at her best here, playing a force of nature. From its first beginning, “The Five Devils” feels like the inevitable encounter of indestructible drives, which send sparks flying both when they are satisfied and when they are denied.
Although inevitability is baked into the film, more could have perhaps been done to raise the audience’s blood pressure through the character of Vicky, who, regardless of her abilities, is still a little girl. Her gifts seem to be little more than a narrative device, their wider significance left unexplored. Bringing out these other dimensions might have made “The Five Devils” less of a satisfyingly neat puzzle, but perhaps a more touching and memorable one. [B+]
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