Pawel Pawlikowski, director of the film “The Woman in the Fifth,” in Toronto during the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2011.JENNIFER ROBERTS
It has been a while since North American filmgoers have had the opportunity to fix their eyes on anything by Pawel Pawlikowski. The last time would have been eight years ago, with the release of My Summer of Love, a brilliant exploration of romance and class, deception and betrayal involving two young Yorkshire women (Emily Blunt, Natalie Press) that went on to win best-picture honours from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2005.
The "drought" is finally ending this spring with the commercial release of The Woman in the Fifth, an oblique quasi-thriller in the key of Polanski, set in a purgatorial Paris, that had its bow at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. "Drought" actually is the wrong word; it somehow implies that the Polish-born director, now 55, couldn't settle on a project or was avoiding the soundstage when, in fact, the absence can be explained by the death of Pawlikowski's wife in 2006 and his decision to look after their two children until they reached their late teens and early 20s.
The Woman in the Fifth is not quite the comeback picture one might have expected from Pawlikowski, who, with the exception of stays in Germany, Italy and more recently France, has spent most of his adult life in England. Even his producers, when they brought him a copy of the 2007 thriller of the same name by Douglas Kennedy as a possible project for adaptation, told him, " 'It's not exactly your kind of thing.' But I read it," Pawlilowski said in an interview in Toronto last fall, "and I enjoyed it even if, it's true, it wasn't my kind of literature."
Of course, for any good cineaste, a novel is less sacrosanct text than "launching pad" – the term used by actor Ethan Hawke, whom Pawlikowski cast as Tom Ricks, the film's lead character, an American novelist/academic with thick-lensed horn-rims who travels to Paris to get closer to the daughter his estranged ex-wife is determined to keep to herself. Robbed upon arrival, bereft of ID, clearly in desperate straits emotionally and psychologically, Ricks washes up at a dingy hotel in a Paris suburb, paying his tab by working as a night watchman in a spooky bunker where the clientele is sinister, the goings-on mysterious. His life becomes further complicated when he finds himself bedding two women, an older Hungarian emigrée (Kristin Scott Thomas) and the much younger chambermaid at the hotel (Joanne Kulig).
The Woman in the Fifth doesn't lack for twists but it moves, as Pawlikowski observed, more to "the rhythms of its own poetry and logic" than to "the generic rules of the thriller genre. I wanted to create a world of intensity, to hypnotize the viewer rather than have him following a plot or reacting to the usual stimuli. … It's the hero who's the 'problem' and you have to take that as the point of departure for the film."
Said Hawke, who first met Pawlikowski in mid-2009 while he was in London performing onstage in The Winters Tale and The Cherry Orchard: "Pawel works in a very, very different way. … He doesn't really care about the script, the script is kind of a prompt for an event, the event being the filming of his ideas. I think you can tell by watching The Woman in the Fifth he likes to work in symbols. He's interested in the subconscious and how subjective reality is for all of us.
"In 20 years of making movies," he went on, "I've never had anybody talk about the picture frame the way Pawel does. He talks about shapes not just colours – lotsa people will talk about green and purple and what that means – but Pawel is all about the way shapes and colour and movement respond to each other in a way that I imagine Fellini or Antonioni might have talked about. It was a lotta fun."
While Paris is a profound presence in the film, it's what Pawlikowski calls "a mental Paris," not the icon-studded Paris of Charade or Gigi or Woody Allen . "The problem with the city for a filmmaker is that it's a cliché of itself. It looks like Paris everywhere you go! So the question becomes, how do we create a different space?"
For Pawlikowski, part of the answer came during preproduction as he scouted locations riding all over the French capital on the back of a moped piloted by his production designer, Benoît Barouh. "We were looking for these melancholy corners," the director explained. "When I'd see a space that had the feel of, say, Central Europe in the 1980s, I'd say, 'Okay, let's stop here' and we'd take photos."