Léa Mysius crafts an enigmatic tale about a young girl with a magical sense of smell in her auspicious second feature.
This auspicious and enigmatic second feature from French filmmaker Léa Mysius unfurls like an ethereal remix of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in its fantasy-flecked exploration of a pre-teen girl attempting to comprehend the romantic affiliations of her parents. It’s perhaps not as cut-and-dried as that description makes it sound, and there are fewer explosions of violence. Passion, yes; violence, no.
The Five Devils (a title referring – curiously – to a leisure centre in the film) instead employs ellipses, flashbacks and time switches as mechanisms to forge missing pieces from a narrative puzzle which is, from the outset, purposefully misshapen. Vicky (Sally Dramé) is the latch-key, biracial daughter of Adèle Exarchopoulos’ dour aquatic aerobics instructor Joanne and emotionally distant fire-fighter Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue).
Both parents appear to be sleepwalking through a marriage of inconvenience, to the extent that you’re left to wonder if they may be play-acting their roles for Vicky’s sake. As an actor, Exarchopoulos is preternaturally good showing you her inner feelings with the minimum of crass emoting. The arrival of Jimmy’s estranged sister Julia (Swala Emati) acts as the catalyst for all manner of furtive comings and goings, and the almost surreally stand-offish nature of the characters provides the film’s ominous question mark: what happened in the past to make these people like they are?
Mysius, thankfully, opts for the road less travelled to transport us towards our answers, dispensing with all but cursory exposition and instead placing young Vicky front-and-centre to be our portal into the past. For it transpires that Vicky possesses supremely heightened olfactory skills, and spends much of her time squirrelled away with her collection of mason jars while making potions. And this isn’t just some kids play stuff, she is replicating the scents of those around her, and it’s suggested that this special power sends her into unconscious reveries where she finds herself witnessing key interactions involving her parents in the past.
If that sounds like a wacky sci-fi story or ooky-kooky magical realism, then it could be further from the truth, as Mysius frames this ability as something very banal and natural. The director’s only stylistic vice comes from the music, which consists of atonal dirges (and a Class-A Bonnie Tyler needle drop) – otherwise, she makes you work hard to keep tabs on where and when you are, and whose perspective we’re seeing things from.
Audacious as it is, The Five Devils is a remarkably sedate and ominous film which captures the way that the worlds of adults and children harmoniously orbit around one another while always remaining distant, beautiful, unreachable.
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Published 20 Mar 2023
The director’s debut, Ava, was very good indeed.
A knotty new twist on timeworn material that’s lifted by some eccentric stylistic flourishes.
Mysius is really out there doing her own bizarre thing, and more power to her.
Abdellatif Kechiche’s passionate lesbian love story is a screen romance that’s built for the long-haul.
Ira Sachs returns with an intimate, intense three-hander about a Fassbinder-like film director played by the great Franz Rogowski.
The director of olfactory wonder, The Five Devils, reflects on making a film about potions, memory and the sense of smell.
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