The mysterious stranger

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Movie
German title The mysterious stranger
Original title La femme du Vème
Country of production France , Great Britain , Poland
original language English
Publishing year 2011
length 85 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Paweł Pawlikowski
script Paweł Pawlikowski
production Caroline Benjo,
Carole Scotta
music Max de Wardener ,
Sylvain Morizet
camera Ryszard Lenczewski
cut David Charap
occupation

The mysterious stranger (original title: La Femme du Vème ) is a French-British-Polish psychological thriller by Paweł Pawlikowski from 2011. The film is loosely based on the novel The Women in the 5th by Douglas Kennedy .

action

After an unspecified scandal at an American university where he taught, the writer Tom Ricks comes to Paris to get closer to his daughter from his divorced marriage with the French Nathalie. Nathalie, who is obviously afraid of him, prevents any contact between father and daughter, even with the help of the police.

When Ricks falls asleep in a bus exhausted, he is robbed. All he has left is his passport, a little cash and a stuffed giraffe for his daughter. He ended up in a shabby neighborhood far away from the tourist centers. The owner of a dingy pub with Arabic-sounding music gives him a room in his shabby hotel. But he takes his passport away until Ricks can pay, and he offers him a night job. Enclosed in a bare concrete cell, into which indefinable sounds occasionally penetrate, Rick's people, whom he can only see on a monitor and who know a certain code word, are supposed to let into the house. He is strictly forbidden from investigating what is going on in the house.

During the day he roams Paris, secretly observing his daughter, and he begins working on a novel. A casual acquaintance invites him to a “ literary salon ” in his apartment, where a mixed-intellectual audience meets. There he meets a woman who starts a flirt with him and slips him her business card. She lives in the 5th arrondissement and mentions that she is always home from 4 p.m. While he goes about his work at night in the dubious house - once he finds fresh traces of blood in the hallway - and writes by day, in the afternoon he goes to the stranger's apartment, who pulls him both into her bed and deeper into hers weaves his own world, in which incomprehensible rules apply to him and which binds him to himself with vague, ambiguous promises.

However, that does not prevent him from giving in to the seduction of the beautiful young Polish woman Ania, the café owner's lover. He sleeps with her and gives himself into the hands of his brutal and animal neighbor, who blackmailed him. When he is found dead, with his throat cut, in the filthy toilet - eternal point of contention between the two - Ricks comes under suspicion and is locked up. When he tries to introduce the stranger to the police for his alibi, it turns out that the apartment has been empty for years. The real culprit is found, however: it is the café owner that Ricks met on the way out of the prison cell and who openly threatens him. When Ricks' daughter disappears (but reappears soon afterwards), Ricks is interrogated again by the police.

The ending is left open, the director leaves it to the audience to judge whether he only witnessed the fears and phantasms of the protagonists was, or whether the story has occurred real.

Production and publication

The Mysterious Stranger is the first feature film that Pawlikowski made after a break of almost eight years. The shooting took place from mid-April to early June 2010 in little-known areas of Paris, e.g. B. rue des Poissoniers 131 (bar and hotel), boulevard Pereire 142 (Nathalie's apartment) and rue de L'Ourq, located in the 17th, 18th and 19th arrondissements of Paris. One location in the film, however, is the 5th arrondissement, in which the mysterious stranger lives and to which the novel and film title La femme du V ème refer.

The film was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival , the Austin Film Festival and the Rome Film Festival and in October 2011 at the Gijón Film Festival before it was released in France on November 16, 2011 .

Reviews

Roger Ebert describes The Mysterious Stranger as a film about loneliness and despair. Time's reviewer calls it a cool, creepy psychological thriller. The thoughtful, seductive drama is full of indirect allusions ("devious strategies"), starting with the name of the protagonist: T. Ricks = tricks.

David Gritten, the Telegraph's film critic, praised the work of Ryszard Lenczewski, the director's long-time cameraman, his unusual camera positions and the repeated filming of unfamiliar Parisian locations, which have an almost hypnotic effect and which evoke visual parallels to the mental state of the protagonist.

The American film critic Manohla Dargis also praises the cameraman's performance and is full of praise for the work of the sound team . The film has a dark sheen, both elegance and mystery, the portrayal is appropriately reserved and fascinating.

Awards

In 2011 the film was nominated for the Gold Hugo as “Best International Feature” of the Chicago International Film Festival and for the Golden Marc'Aurelio Award of the Rome Film Fest 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for The Mysterious Stranger . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , February 2012 (PDF; test number: 131 752 V).
  2. ↑ The Woman in the Fifth on rogerebert.com, accessed November 15, 2016.
  3. ^ The Women in the 5th and La Mort . In: Time , June 14, 2012, accessed November 16, 2016.
  4. ^ David Gritten: The Woman in the Fifth, review . In: The Telegraph , February 17, 2012, accessed February 15, 2016.
  5. ↑ Review Sacrebleu! What the Hell Happens at the End of The Woman in the Fifth? on movieline.com, accessed November 15, 2016.