François Ozon's marital diss 5x2 finds an auteur in the analyst's chair.

By Kimberly Chun

OF THE FIVE backward glances at a man and a woman's relationship – cue Francis Lai – in François Ozon's 5x2, two moments stand out, almost as bookends: In the first, Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) close their clinical but exceedingly civilized divorce proceedings with an afternoon hook-up in a Spartan hotel room. The downcast eyes and blank expressions of the officious legal severance segue smoothly into the cool blues and greens of the bare rented room, Freiss's mystified stare, and Bruni-Tedeschi's modestly lowered gaze as she returns from the bathroom where she undressed for a last tangle with her ex.

But what starts out as both tender and tentative, between two good, modern bourgeois, soon goes completely wrong, ending with an extreme close-up of a traumatized Marion's tears, whatever remained of the ruptured relationship in tatters. As the horrified Marion pulls on her clothes, Gilles cluelessly pouts, "You get dressed. You get laid. You're happy."

"I didn't win or lose. It's over," she angrily returns, answering his offer to give it another try with the slam of the door. Ozon caps it with the sound of Roy Orbison's tremulous wail, triumphant and terrible in his masochistic majesty (and infinitely preferable to the now-trite Triscuit "I Will Survive"), as she marches to the elevator.

The other instance comes late in 5x2's game – and early on in Marion and Gilles's coupledom, as the movie's scenes from a marriage unreel backward, following time's arrow from split to sweetheart status, in a rewound-chronology gesture that subtly brings the expressway-to-yr.-skull narrative violation of Irreversible to mind rather than the playful scramble of Pulp Fiction. Marion and Gilles have just been married, amid much merriment, dancing, and gold light. Drunken revelry, however, turns into a damsel's reverie, as the groom passes out in the gilt-and-satin baroque nuptial chamber and the bride is left alone to wander, on her wedding night, straight into the arms of an oddly wooden type: an American tourist, enjoying a precoital cig with all the grace of Smokey in the French woods. But against the grain of better judgment, and according to the custom of the country, she comes running back – her libido revved and ready to cuddle with her still-dead-to-the-world new hubby – jogging toward the camera, down a corridor in a scene that rhymes with her last good-bye. Despite Bruni-Tedeschi's athletic build, she's less a "just do it" Nike amazon than a fairytale antiheroine in thermals and jeans. It's her storybook romance. Gilles is just the first husband.

And thanks to the loving ministrations of Ozon – and his track record for coaxing remarkable performances out of La Deneuve, La Ardant, La Huppert, La Darrieux, La Béart, La Sagnier, and his muse, cold, sexy fish Charlotte Rampling, in 8 Women, Swimming Pool, and Under the Sand – the remarkable Bruni-Tedeschi becomes the warm heart at the center of 5x2 in a star-making performance. A man who loves women as much as any, Ozon has every right to Cukor's crown as their confidante, chronicler, and keeper of their secrets and fantasies. By now – with his S-M Hansel and Gretel rewrite, Criminal Lovers, far in the past – Ozon seems to have styled himself as one of the friendliest enquirers into the inner lives of women, apart from European lens-women like Varda, Denis, Ackerman, Kurys, and Wertmuller.

With 5x2 he seems to query: What happens when bad love happens to a good woman? Part of the answer might lie with Marion's venom-spewing monster of a papa, played by Michael Lonsdale and evoking his director, Luis Bunuel, in The Phantom of Liberty. There's little discreet charm to this bourgeois, as he verbally rips into Marion's mother and drops hints as to why his daughter chooses her men so poorly. In straight-faced marriage counselor mode, mainlining the stern, austere realism of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage rather than the assuming the guise of the freewheeling fantasist of 8 Women or the conspiratorial voyeur of Swimming Pool, Ozon seems less interested in blame or play (despite his striking use of pop and Italian love songs) than in peeling back the opaque truths that made up a relationship: Is Gilles weak or cold, or does he simply prefer men, as he suggests in stoned, sexually charged dinner chatter with his gay brother and hot young boyfriend?

For Ozon and his lovers, the route to desire is never as straight, serviceable, or uncomplicated as a maiden's path down a hotel hallway. Perhaps dancing backward – like the ever-underestimated Ginger – is the only way to tell, with a gentle touch that a woman can appreciate, what went wrong, and the only way to end happily, as Marion and Gilles bravely wade out into the surf of a holiday picture-postcard beginning.

'5x2' opens Fri/24 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.