Woman in the Fifth

France. Pretty Recommended.
A French movie, mostly in French with two Hollywood stars. The director is from almost everywhere in Europe except France. I’m not sure what that is about. I have a bit of an attitude toward Kristin Scott Thomas. She seems to have a taste for roles portraying people I seriously dislike, often in that genre of movie I think of as privileged-people-making-themselves-unnecessarily-miserable. Except she has been in a number of French movies and I generally like both her character and the movie. She is great in this movie. Her character is intended to be very enigmatic, the audience is not 100% sure she even exists. She does this wonderfully. She conveys the ambiguity of the character as surely as if she were winking at the camera, without being a bit obvious even about that.

There is a storyline in this movie that is always intriguing. Guy randomly walks into a café and with no particular plan becomes involved in that scene, becomes one of the people in the ecosystem of that random café.  Walk down the street and a door will be open, look in and people are interacting and there is a little universe spinning on its own axis in there. Behind every door.

Its best to see some movies without knowing anything at all about the story. This is one of those. Try not to read anything. All I will say about it is that there is one element that is often used in movies that I think is kind of a cheat.