The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

From my favorite movies..

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A Haunting Enigma of a Film where there are no easy answers, but they are there if you look and listen closely, that is filled with Ugly and Beautiful images suggesting a Schizophrenic impression of Life. Illustrating that, in effect, perception and point of view is all in the Mind.This is Creepy and Complex and is not an easy decipher, like Psychoanalysis it may take some time to penetrate its Secrets and uncover the Pathology. It is intriguing, but not always Fun discovering the ambiguous layers in this Movie with its decidedly Euro feeling. Through the glasses darkly.It is Cerebral Cinema for those wanting that sort of thing. Upon reflection it is much more than the initial Viewing would suggest and would seem to invite a second look. Obviously not for everyone, but those willing to take chances and explore the wide range of Experiences that Movies have to offer, this is a good one. Ethan Hawke shows some disciplined range and the Foreign Director may pick up a few American admirers with this Artistic Vision.

While Ethan Hawke is not one of my favorite actors, Kirstin Scott-Thomas is. This is not to say I don't like Hawke, though if this were the only film of his I'd seen, I wouldn't want to see another. This film is the only one of Scott-Thomas that I haven't liked. So, how could these two actors be in such a flop? I actually turned it off about two thirds of the way through, too bored to continue. I found myself wondering how much time was taken up in loooong camera shots. As the character played by Ethan Hawke screws his way back and forth between two women, not too much else happens. The characters I found to be pretentious (especially K. Scott-Thomas's character) and predictable. If you're considering watching The Woman in the Fifth, don't waste your time.

One of the first things one must examine of him/herself Immediately after a film ends; e.g., as the credits roll, is, "Am I moved and, if the answer is yes, how so?". Don't ask yourself, "Should I decide to like or dislike this film?". Don't just decide whether you had fun or not. Rather, take a "gut check" to examine whether or not you perceive an experience that is going to stay with you awhile, maybe bug and/or annoy you, but definitely haunt you for a period.I'm guessing not too many films may do such to the average person. TWITF surely did such for me. I've as many questions and, yes, frustrations, that many of the other COMMENTERS herein have, even the people who gave TWITF one star. But I've still got that gut reaction that this movie will linger we me a long time and linger in my top 50 film list. Maybe it's the acting alone, though probably it all the stuff that make movies good; i.e., photography, directing, dialog, etc. Dunno. Don't care.Maybe the plot and intentions are truly nonsense. Doesn't matter. I'm amazed and intrigued. It's hard to get me amazed and intrigued. And I LIKE being amazed and intrigued. Films like AVATAR can razzle dazzle me with eye candy and, yes, I'll keep coming back for more such sweets. But I like better the part of my brain that buzzes after seeing films like TWITF.

The whole movie is depressing nihilistic garbage that raises many questions in the minds of the viewers and fails to answer any of them tying off loose ends. The setting is dreary and makes you want to contemplate suicide.We start off with a depressed sack of **** writer who wrote one novel and is visiting Paris, France to talk to stalk his daughter who he wants to see but can't because his wife has a restraining order on him.Early on in the movie he talks to his daughter, the daughter asks if he was in prison, and he says he was in a hospital. It seems apparent that he's mentally unstable and was likely confined in an asylum. The entire movie may in fact be his own scrambled and distorted thoughts while he's kept in a mental institution, but we don't know this for sure, and the movie never reveals anything.The writer falls asleep on a bus and gets robbed. He has nothing and ends up in staying over at some Arabic m**-****e's cafeteria for free but his passport is taken from him until he pays up. He's half-ass-ed some write up about a forest with an owl and red beetles and so on whilst staying there and gets invited to some literary club. There he meets a strangely 1-dimensional woman, alone out on a balcony, after having listened to a (different) woman tell him about an artist's need for love to create. It will become more apparent later but the woman he meets on the balcony seems not to be a part of his imaginings, which is suggested even more so later on by her saying that she knew everything about him, and also by her revealing little about her own life... other than that her husband was a writer and is dead.Hmmmm....Anyways, so he also has this affair with another woman in the Arab cafeteria he's staying in and this annoying N***o next door who the writer had a dispute with over the use of the shared toilet earlier finds out he's getting intimate with said woman in the cafeteria. The N***o demands a large sum of Eros and even pushes a note to the man requesting he pay up. **** gets wacky when the N***o is found murdered in the bathroom with a toilet brush stuffed up his mouth and blood everywhere. The writer is taken to prison because they think he killed him. The writer himself was over at the woman he met on balcony's house having intercourse with her at the time though and he uses her as an alibi. According to the police though that note where the N***o demanded those Eros from him, had only his finger prints on it, and the woman on the balcony was dead long ago....Oh crap I forgot about how at some point he's offered a job as a kind of security guy by the Arab m**-****e so he can still keep living there. Some strange illegal **** goes on there, or at least that's heavily implied, and anyways he has to let people in who ring the bell if they say they want to see this guy (whose named translated into English means "The World"). I wonder if this is metaphorical for him letting people... oh I don't know.At the end of it all some more **** happens (Arab m**-****e goes to jail instead of him, he's released), daughter goes missing, is found again, and at the very end it seems he joins balcony woman indefinitely, which means he committed suicide I guess, or perhaps his mind broke completely. I don't know.If this movie has a point, it would appear to be to illustrate how ****ty life is in France where multiculturalism, broken families, crime, decay, and so on have ruined life for the white French man.Tl;Dr Horrible movie full of bad feels and loose ends set in dreary multicultural-f***ed Paris, France. Don't watch it or you'll end up like me wasting even more time just trying to figure it all out.