MOVIE REVIEW: 5 TO 7

5 to 7_060613_066.NEF

5 to 7_060613_066.NEF

Published Jun 12, 2015

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5 TO 7

DIRECTOR: Victor Levin

CAST: Anton Yelchin, Bérénice Marlohe, Olivia Thirlby, Glenn Close, Frank Langella,

CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG SP

RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes

RATING: ***

 

 

 

WHILE it doesn’t exactly take your breath away, this small coming-of-age story will make you smile about how film can romanticise even the slightest of ideas.

It almost works because of engaging performances from the two leads, which manage to mostly overcome the storyline’s very obvious rom-com clichés.

Yelchin is would-be author Brian who meets older Frenchwoman, Arielle (Marlohe), and embarks on a life-changing affair with the married mother of two.

She insists that they can only meet between the hours of 5pm and 7pm and their time spent together gives Brian not only some valuable life experience which deepens his ability to express himself in his writing, but makes Arielle believe that there is such a thing as falling in love.

The film explores their different world-views, pitting his more neurotic sensibility predicated on sticking to rules against her freer sense of following her feelings. This is couched in cultural terms often used in films so that is where things become very clichéd – they wander around New York in a very calculated manner doing things like introducing each other to their favourite tipple.

He may be an out-of-work writer, but they get to hang out at some very posh places which rather cuts down on the believability of the story, but it is a film after all and only in films do poor writers survive in expensive New York to write amazing novels.

Langella and Close pop up as Brian’s parents, delivering some fun lines with deadpan style, while Lambert Wilson is the epitome of Hollywood’s version of the suave French gentleman as Arielle’s husband, Valery.

Brian gets to do the growing, apparent in his narrated voiceover, while the elegant Marlohe simply has to be desirable and the movie ends with the idea that every book is written for one person. The retrospective voice-over explores the idea that a good heartbreak will give you fodder for a truly great novel and Yelchin is at his best once he has pinned his heart to his sleeve and been rejected.

The whole story is romanticised in the extreme – the New York setting, French culture, the life of a would-be writer – but one thing that never gets explained is why she falls for him. He explains why he falls for her – it is such an emotionally important moment that he even milks a best-seller out of it – but Arielle’s motives remain a mystery.

Cineastes will recognise references to everything from Francois Truffaut to Woody Allen, but this isn’t the point – director Levin emphasises tone and sentimentality and above all this film is more about the art of writing as expressed on the big screen, than it is about Brian and Arielle’s relationship.

If you liked The Words or The Graduate, you will like this.

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