Pawel
Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth is the kind of movie whose flaws might
actually be an offshoot of its director’s talent. Pawlikowski tends to make
touching mood pieces about loss and regret, but this film sets itself up as
something of a thriller. Ethan Hawke plays Tom Ricks, a writer who is visiting
Paris to be with his family. But he’s very quickly turned away by his wife, who
does not want him anywhere near her or their daughter. (“Can we just talk like
normal people?” he asks his wife. “You’re not normal,” she says and calls the
cops.) There are some indications that he’s been in a hospital, or a prison. Robbed
of his suitcase and money, Tom finagles himself into a room in a seedy
bar-hotel. In exchange, he takes a somewhat thankless, no-questions-asked job
where he has to sit behind a desk in a nondescript building and let in various
shady looking characters who utter a cryptic password.
