Pawel Pawlikowski's Woman In The Fifth (2011) is just a VERY POOR film, in my opinion. The character of Tom Ricks is ill conceived and quite frankly pathetic. Tom, overall, is portrayed as just being a very STUPID man, a LOSER. He even acts STUPID most of the time, as when he tries to exit the attorney's office through the wrong door, and when he loses his luggage and money when he falls asleep on the bus, and he consistently wears a STUPID, LOSER expression on his face throughout the whole film. His expression reminds me of a deer caught in the headlights. There is nothing in Tom's character that would suggest that he was a college lecturer and a novelist, as he says he is in the film. There is a suggestion early in the film that Tom was previously in a hospital, presumably a mental hospital, and his "imaginary" lover Margrit, I suppose, is supposed to be a psychotic hallucination. But mentally ill people don't act the way Tom does. The screenwriter and the director failed to differentiate between mental illness and STUPIDITY.Although Tom's supposedly a former college lecturer and a novelist, he can't find a better job in Paris than working as a "guard" of some sort. Even without a work permit, someone with Tom's education would be able to find a better job "off the books" just by going around Paris and talking to people, by using the verbal skills that enabled him to write a novel. and to be a lecturer on literature. He even looks pathetic and incompetent in his first approach to Margrit at the literary party. His verbal skills in trying to "pick up" Margrit are pathetic.The whole premise that Tom came all the way to Paris just to be with his daughter is ill conceived. He seems to have moved to Paris without any preparation, with no place to stay, and no job prospects. Only a LOSER would move from the USA to Paris so unprepared. That he stumbles into a café after his money is stolen where the owner,Serez is willing to give him a room without any money up front is an unreal :coincidence". That the same Serez just happens to have an "off the books" job for Tom when he needs one is another unreal "coincidence". Such "unreal coincidences" in a screenplay indicate a weak substitution of a literary artifice for real creative thought.That Tom would become involved with the café waitress Annia without knowing that she is already Serez's girlfriend is just STUPID. Only a LOSER could spend as much time at the café as Tom did without picking up on the fact that Serez already had something going with Annia. That Annia would be so forward in her attempts to seduce Tom without at least advising him that she has some sort of romantic attachment to Serez, an obviously "bad dude", is even more STUPID.The whole nature of the "guard" job that Serez gives Tom is STUPID. Tom seems to understand that there is something shady going on behind the locked door that he monitors, but is seemingly not concerned that his "guard" job might be implicating him in criminal activity. That the viewer is never informed about what the nature of the "mysterious" business is behind the door that Tom is "guarding" is even more STUPID, and is merely indicative of a flaky screenplay.The whole business about Margrit is STUPID. The detective that was questioning Tom goes to Margrit's apartment only to return to tell Tom that Margrit committed suicide years before. So if Margrit is just some sort of psychotic hallucination by Tom, then how did Tom get the illusory woman's name correct, and even know her correct address? Psychotic hallucinations don't travel back in time and "attach" themselves to already dead people, and to their last known address when they were alive. What Tom was experiencing was more like a paranormal, or a voodoo experience, and nothing like mental illness at all. People who are mentally ill enough to hallucinate do not do so only part of the time. People mentally ill enough to hallucinate as vividly as Tom supposedly did about Margrit, are VERY mentally ill ALL of the time. The character Tom in this film is not convincingly portrayed as being mentally ill at all, but, rather, as a LOSER. And LOSERS do not have psychotic hallucinations but rather, are more likely to end up sitting on a street curb in skid row drinking out of a wine bottle.After the detective tells Tom that Margrit killed herself years ago, why didn't Tom produce the calling card Margrit gave him at the party, or advise the detective about the bookstore owner who invited Tom to that party? Tom isn't shown going back to the bookstore owner to try to confirm that a "real" Margrit even attended the party. There's a BIG "hole" in the storyline right here.Overall, there is no discernible "meaning" in this film for me. This film doesn't even "just spins a good yarn" because the film doesn't even give the viewer any kind of clear story. It's just about the aimless wanderings of an inadequate, incompetent man, a LOSER, with a consistently STUPID look on his face that has some kind of paranormal, or voodoo experience involving a woman who's been dead for many years.THIS FILM IS A LOSER. The money and time spent on making this film was just a WASTE.

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.

Review Movie The woman in the fifth FRA 2011 Boring for the first hour,first part turn all around this loser(should be the main character)a desperate father from US divorced that after a long and unlucky travel,he does find relax but an ex-angry wife,and his target(spend time with his daughter) the scenario is France on present day.Luckily after that the story become interesting.The polish director try to give us a picture of our modern society problems. A melting story of a familiar drama,with a supernatural part,the protagonist pass through tragic situations,an excruciating movie but with a surprising ending. Music excellent(in part polish because of the director i guess). Slow movie Vinz.

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.