5X2

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi (left) and Stephane Freiss head for divorce.

Herald rating: * *

An anatomy of a disintegrating marriage, this is the work of French director Francois Ozon, who made the promising but ultimately very silly Swimming Pool (in this film's final scene he recycles swimming as a metaphor for romance). The trick is that the story is told in reverse: the opening cold and perfunctory divorce hearing is the first of five vignettes (hence the title) that will take us back to the lovers' meeting.

The reverse narrative is no novelty since the gimmicky Memento and the heartrending Irreversible. The latter film explores the same territory as this one but does so with a tragic potency because the director makes us feel that there's something at stake. By contrast, the emotional lives of Gilles (Freiss) and Marion (Bruni-Tedeschi) remain a virtual mystery to us, hinted at only in throwaway comments or hooded glances.

The film purports to be a sort of romantic mystery in which we engage in something like emotional forensics as we realise the inevitability of the first (last) scene. The problem is that the characters are, respectively, impossible to like or believe.

Gilles is an odious, self-centred emotional adolescent (some women may think this rings true) and, though the very watchable Bruni-Tedeschi tries hard to make Marion breathe, she drowns in a mid-film wedding-night scene that is laughably implausible.

Rejigged into chronological order, this is a bland and rather banal story, a cold and comfortless study of curdled expectation. "Nobody won," one character says to another at the start (end). "It's just over." Problem is, it's just beginning.

CAST: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Stephane Freiss Director: Francois Ozon
RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes
RATING: R18 (violence, offensive language, drug use, sex
SCREENING: Rialto
VERDICT: An anatomy of a marriage told in reverse is rather banal because the emotional lives of its two lovers remain a mystery.