"5x2": A marriage in pieces, "Memento" style

French director François Ozon has described his new film "5x2" ("Cinq Fois Deux," if you need to impress dinner guests) as beginning like Ingmar Bergman and ending like Claude Lelouch, the lightweight farceur of the '60s. It's a failed marriage told backward, showing us five scenes between its two principals (get it?) as they move from divorce to dinner-party disagreement to childbirth to their first tentative flirtation on adjoining Sardinian beach towels. It's probably meant to evoke both Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage" and Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," but it's a quirkier, shiftier work than either of those.

Sure, the backward narrative seems a little gimmicky these days, but "5x2" is an admirably economical production without a second wasted. And while the mercurial Ozon -- whose films include the quasi-musical "8 Women," the erotic thriller "Swimming Pool" and the existential mystery "Under the Sand" -- has never struck me as being able to manage strong emotion, this peculiar picture carries its very own atmosphere of wistful doom.

Ozon begins almost with a sucker punch: Having just gotten divorced in a polite ceremony, a handsome 40ish couple named Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) engage in rough hotel-room sex that's awfully close to rape, if it isn't the real thing. They may not be husband and wife anymore, but whatever pathology was sticking them together hasn't let go.

The rest of "5x2" (scripted by Ozon and Emmanuèle Bernheim) doesn't exactly answer the question of what went wrong between Gilles and Marion; instead it offers shards of a shattered mirror, as if to say, yeah, this happened to these people, but their marriage might not be so different from yours or mine. We meet Gilles' feckless gay brother, Marion's quarrelsome parents and the visiting American actor she sleeps with (on her wedding night!). We don't get any long arguments or monologues in the Albee-Bergman mode. Ozon is more interested, you might say, in people's expressions than in their words.

Given the brief, spare scenes and the wry Italian love songs on the soundtrack between them, Ozon's actors carry almost the entire weight of lending this film emotional resonance. Bruni-Tedeschi is the sort of slightly gawky woman who becomes beautiful as middle age approaches. For much of her career in French movies she's been playing comic moms or sidekicks; here she lets herself be sexy and wounded and furious by turns, and it's a revelation. Freiss is a well-built, handsome guy with something almost unfocused about him; when he sits outside in the car chain-smoking while Marion is giving birth, you can almost feel his fatal uncertainty.

In the end I respected "5x2" more than I loved it. As we move backward in time, the distance between audience and characters inevitably widens -- we know what's going to happen and they don't -- and I found the effect a little astringent. Your results may vary; Ozon's construction is ingenious, and he manages the film's warring tones -- tongue-in-cheek comedy on one hand, raw pathos on the other -- with elegance. Maybe you've seen other movies where the handsome guy and the beautiful woman literally go off into the sunset together. But you've never seen it and felt so wistful.

"5x2" opens June 10 in New York and June 17 in Los Angeles, with other cities to follow.

"Wild Side": Sexual revolution in slow motion

If Andrei Tarkovsky had shared Pedro Almodóvar's interest in alt-sexuality subcultures, he might have made something like "Wild Side." That's not an unqualified endorsement. Sébastien Lifshitz's meditative, non-linear, nearly experimental film about the life of a Parisian transsexual prostitute is the sort of thing that goes over big at high-end festivals (the Berlin audience loved this one) but isn't likely to get any traction among the general public.

Shot in spectacular wide-screen by the great French cinematographer Agnès Godard, "Wild Side" is the kind of movie you either surrender to or walk out on. There is a story of sorts; the startlingly beautiful Stéphanie (played by real-life transsexual Stéphanie Michelini) lives in one of those depressing towers in suburban Paris with her two lovers, a French Arab named Jamel (Yasmine Belmadi), also a hustler, and a Russian boxer named Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine), who speaks absolutely no French. Stéphanie's mother, somewhere in the desolate north of France, is dying, and she has to go home and care for her, which brings up memories of Pierre, the little boy Stéphanie used to be.

But you've got to travel more than halfway to "Wild Side" even to gather that much. Lifshitz never gives us any help with geography or chronology; his visual sequences are disconnected and information is kept to a bare minimum. Are Stéphanie, Jamel and Mikhail happy in their cozy ménage à trois, or desperate and lost? We don't know; maybe they don't either. Mostly we watch things happen: Jamel turns tricks in the train station; Stéphanie turns tricks in cars, discos, old men's apartments. Mikhail and Jamel try to converse, in fragmentary English. Stéphanie watches the birds fly in circles on her parents' farm, and summons a deep-focus childhood memory.

Still, in its elliptical way, "Wild Side" is a precisely structured film that very gradually weaves its spell. If you're willing to let it unfold without any particular expectations, it might surprise you. There's a lot of explicit sex in the film, most of it totally unerotic. But when a john pays Mikhail and Stéphanie to get it on in front of him, and you realize you're actually watching two people who love each other express it physically, no matter the tawdry circumstances, it packs a totally unexpected emotional wallop. Lifshitz wants us neither to judge nor to love Stéphanie, but simply to see her. "Wild Side" is sometimes maddening to watch, but will haunt you for days afterward.

"Wild Side" opens June 10 in New York, with other cities to follow.

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