The Five Devils: Sniffing for Meaning in an Odd French Multicultural, Bisexual Psychodrama

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

There’s a fine line between mysterious and baffling. The Five Devils, directed by Léa Mysius, is both.

It’s a jumble of child’s fantasy, horror and time travel, in a multicultural, bisexual drama,  set in a French alpine village out of a fairy tale. The film is centered by an intensely physical performance by Blue Is the Warmest Colour’s breakout star, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and newcomer child actor, Sally Dramé as her biracial daughter.

The film evokes both Céline Sciamma’s recent magic realist mother-daughter drama, Petit Maman, and Brian De Palma’s horror classic, Carrie.

Sally Dramé is a young girl with witchy powers, including an acute sense of smell, in The Five Devils.

 Though one might guess this is a case of a writer-director trying to say everything everywhere all at once, Mysius, at 33, is already an established pro in the French film industry. Since co-writing her 2017 feature debut Ava, Mysius, has co-written films for some of the biggest names in contemporary French cinema, including Arnaud Desplechin (Ismaël’s Ghosts, Oh Mercy!), André Téchiné (Farewell to the Night), Jacques Audiard (Paris 13th District) and Claire Denis (The Stars at Noon).

The setting of her sophomore film is the mountain-encircled town of Isère. There a woman named Joanne (Exarchopoulos), a graceful athlete, who teaches water aerobics and swimming at the local sports center, and then follows these sessions with a masochistic immersion in an ice-cold lake, testing  the limits of hypothermia.

If you guess she’s tamping down some feelings, you’re right. Joanne’s unhappily married to Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), a Senegalese-French fireman, and they share a daughter, Vicky (Dramé), a beguiling eight-year-old with an outsized Afro, who adores her mother and solemnly witnesses her parents’ bickering.

The domestic scene gets more intense when Jimmy brings his sister, Julia (Swala Emati) into their home, a woman fresh out of an institution, who has a connection to Something Really Bad That Happened in the Past.  Other residents of the town are also upset by Julia’s presence, including one of Joanne’s colleagues at the sports center, Nadine (Daphne Patakia), who has disfiguring scars on her face.

The key to unlocking the backstory is Vicky, who is cruelly taunted by her schoolmates because of her race. Vicky has a super-power, which might not help repel bullies, but would make any sommelier envious. Even when her mother blindfolds her and hides under a pile of leaves in the woods, Vicky can still sniff her out, which barely scratches the surface of her olfactory gifts.

She’s actually a kind of child sorceress who keeps jars in her bedroom with various ingredients - including a dead bird - that recreate the smell imprint of people she knows. When she takes a whiff of one of these potions, she goes into a trance, in which she can journey to the past and see the traumas that shaped other’s lives.

She can look back before she was born, when Julia was a newcomer immigrant to the local high school, where Joanne was a star gymnast.  In those past scenes, her aunt Julia can also see Vicky, though no one else can.

All this is presented in colour-saturated 35-mm cinematography, handled by co-writer Paul Guilhaume, and a visual motif using the elemental images of yellow fire and blue water. At a climactic moment, expect a karaoke duet on Bonnie Tyler’s kitschy 1983 power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

In the end, there’s insufficient emotional pay-off or psychological insight here to justify the credibility-defying tricks and narrative convolutions. But the kid is adorable and Exarchopoulos, as the hot and cold Joanne, is believable at every moment, in a film more attuned to mood and sensation than literal meaning.

The Five Devils. Directed by Leá Mysius. Written by Léa Mysius and Paul Guilhaume. Starring:  Adèle Exarchopoulos, Sally Dramé, Swala Emati, Moustapha Mbengue, Daphné Patakia, Patrick Bouchitey.  The Five Devils is in theatres from March 24 and exclusively on the streaming service, MUBI, from May 12.