The Woman in the Fifth – review

The new film from Paweł Pawlikowski – moody, menacing, downbeat – takes something fro m the director's Polish compatriots Polanski and Kieslowski. It often feels like a sort of b-side to The Tenant ; it could, alternatively, have worked as one of the stories in the Three Colours trilogy. Ethan Hawke plays Tom Ricks, a divorced and depressed American writer who is living in a flea pit hotel in Paris, having spent every last cent pursuing a futile custody claim. At a literary soiree, he meets a beautiful Hungarian widow, Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas); their romantic adventure reignites his literary imagination, but there is an awful price to be paid for this. This film has to be indulged a little, and you'll have to negotiate the stumbling block that is Hawke's stodgy, dodgy French accent. Yet this movie moves at a sinuous, confident pace; it is most captivatingly odd when Margit first kisses Tom and he gulps, flinches, shudders in wordless shock, as if overwhelmed by her sensuality and force.