A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Léa Mysius’ mystery drama The Five Devils (in the original: Les Cinq Diables) is a frustrating film. It is beautifully made and features great central performance. Its ideas are intriguing, and it looks gorgeous to boot, if in a foreboding, even menacing way. (There are shades of the French series The Returned, and not just in the film’s aesthetics.) There is a lot to like here – but the film is weighed down by misusing a metaphysical conceit that, while it could work well in a different film, prompts the audience to focus on all the wrong things and ask all the wrong questions. What we end up with feels like an incongruous blend of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman and the German Netflix series Dark.

The Five Devils is set in a small town in the French Alps, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, for better and for worse. Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is married to Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), but it seems that not all is well in the marriage. Their seven-year-old daughter Vicky (Sally Dramé) is a loner who’s bullied at school (the bullying is disconcerting to watch and in no small part racist). However, Vicky has an extraordinary talent: her sense of smell is so well developed that she can take one whiff of her mother’s diary and not only smell the paper and leather but also the chlorine of the public pool where Joanne works and the coffee ring on one of the pages. Vicky can even reproduce scents, collecting these in labelled jars (we see her carrying one of those jars with the label “Maman 3”, suggesting that somewhere she’s squirrelled away two earlier olfactory versions of her mother).

One day, Jimmy’s sister Julia (Swala Emati) returns after a long absence, and from the first it’s clear that there is history between her, Joanne, and the whole town. Julia has been away for ten years because of something she did, and there are murmurs that the woman is not quite right in the head. Joanne too seems to harbour a deeply-rooted resentment towards her sister-in-law – though are there hints of something else? Vicky picks up on these vibes and takes an instant dislike to her aunt, prompted by the smell of alcohol on her (Vicky’s sense is so well developed that she identifies it as “peated whisky” – her nose has obviously read a guide to Single Malt). In secret, she goes through Julia’s things and then uses the content of a small bottle she finds to recreate her scent – and when she smells the results, she is transported ten years into the past, the days before her parents were together. Vicky is mostly little more than an observer in the past, invisible to her mother and most of her friends, the Julia of the past being the only one to see this strange little girl.

The setup of The Five Devils is intriguing, and Mysius and her cast do a good job of sketching out this little community and the dynamics hiding just underneath the surface. The mysterious conceit that takes Vicky into a past where she wasn’t born yet, revealing things to her that she is barely able to understand, is also interesting – but the film doesn’t have the lightness of touch that Sciamma’s Petite Maman had with respect to its similar metaphysical element. Vicky’s time travel may tell us things about Joanne and Julia, but no more so than could be done by less supernatural means, by diaries or postcards or home movies (as was deftly done in Steven Spielberg’s most recent film The Fabelmans, for instance). While the idea of using scents to transport someone into the past is evocative, as smells are strong mnemonic triggers, the film’s use of this ends up being clunky, piling one metaphysical conceit on top of another: first Vicky’s preternatural sense of smell, then her ability to travel back in time, and finally Julia’s ability to see the interloper from her future. All of this ends up drawing attention to the fantastical elements, distracting from the characters and their relationships. (The problematic aspect that the supernatural in The Five Devils is tied explicitly to two of the film’s black characters doesn’t particularly help.)

It also doesn’t help that the script, written by Mysius and Paul Guilhaume, sets up that most prevalent of time-travel clichés, a causality loop – which, in a different film, could resonate thematically, but here it says nothing about the themes or the characters. More than that, it makes Vicky culpable for things that have nothing to do with her, and it introduces a mystery box that, like so many mystery boxes, vanishes up its own Ouroboros. There are stories here that are engaging and intriguing, and they could have worked even in a story that uses elements of the fantastic – but the story that the film focuses on doesn’t mesh well with these elements. What does it mean that Vicky has this amazing sense of smell? Why is she suddenly transported back in time when she recreates her aunt’s scent, when this has never happened before? What does it mean that Julia can see her in the past?

The thing is: none of these questions really matter, not to this story, which is about mothers and daughters and lives and loves unlived. Vicky’s uncanny ability, or her ending up in the past and spying on her mother before she was a mother, these could have been used as means to explore a familiar story from new angles – but The Five Devils ends up weighed down by its own unnecessary complications. Compare this to Petite Maman (which deals with similar themes but ends up telling a very different story): that film’s use of the fantastical is minimalist, keeping its focus on what the story is actually about. This film is too much occupied with its own genre trappings to realise that they’re a distraction, and in the process it distracts the audience too. The result is not a bad film outright, but it is a film that wastes its considerable potential.