Les cinq diables (The Five Devils) – directed by Léa Mysius – SPOILERS

Eight-year-old Vicky Soler (Sally Dramé) lives in a small mountain village several hours north of Marseilles, somewhere between Grenoble and the five Aiguilles du Diable from which the title of the film is likely derived. (Vicky’s mother was Miss Rhône-Alpes.) A familiar smell can make anyone recall a past moment, but for Vicky, smells literally transport her in time. In the film’s opening scene, Vicki sees a younger version of her mother watching a fire. Her mother turns to look in her direction, as though she might sense she’s being watched.

These visions of the past usually happen to Vicky when she is asleep. To have out-of-body experiences during the day, she creates smelly concoctions, sort of anti-perfumes. After inhaling the fumes from these potions, Vicky passes out and astral-projects into someone else’s past. One might suspect that psychoactive chemicals make her imagine these things, but her Aunt Julia (Swala Emati) is able to see Vicky’s astral self, and Julia’s repeated “visions” of Vicky have, over the years, caused Julia a lot of trouble, so Vicky’s time-traveling is externally validated. Also, Vicky’s “travels” show her things that happened before she was born.

Shortly before Christmas and for the first time in Vicky’s life, Aunt Julia arrives for a visit, explaining that she is in the area for a nanotechnology conference. (Her field is nano-biotechnology and she “works with neurons”.) Her brother is Vicky’s dad (Jimmy Soler played by Moustapha Mbengue). Jimmy is a firefighter and that’s most of what we know about him, except that Nadine (Daphné Patakia), who was disfigured in the fire Vicky saw in her dream, is in love with him. Julia was convicted of setting that fire.

Nadine appears in only a few scenes, but Patakia’s nuanced performance transforms the character into an effective illustration of the village’s collective reaction to Julia. As Jimmy’s firefighter friend Jeff (Hugo Dillon) warns him: “You know people here. There are major, major taboos.”

Julia’s return makes Vicky’s mother Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who swims every day in a very cold lake, very uncomfortable, and it takes a while for us to realize why. Then Julia addresses the question directly. “Are you upset I went berserk?” she asks, and Joanne responds: “Are you upset I had a child with your brother?”

The two of them awkwardly prepare octopus for dinner in a way that is every bit as memorable as that scene in “Annie Hall” with Woody, Diane, and the lobster.

When Joanne swims in that very cold lake, Vicky must watch from shore with a timer and whistle to let her mother know when she must come out of the water, so Vicky is literally what keeps her mother alive. When one of Vicky’s potions stinks up Aunt Julia’s room, her punishment is to spend the day with her grandpa, and Julia (at least for the day) takes over the timer and the whistle.

It is Vicky’s Grandpère (Patrick Bouchitey) who conveys the male perspective in the film (not the strangely detached and hapless Jimmy). When Joanne consults him about her daughter’s peculiar sense of smell, Grandpa changes the subject and responds with a complex cautionary tale about the neighbourhood cat that misses the point of things. “Every day, same time, he comes to the door,” says Gramps, “and every day I give him tuna. Good canned tuna. He loves it. Once I gave him some nice roast beef. Nothing. Jack shit, pal. Not a bite. But now – [cat eats tuna with gusto] – I know there are people starving to death, but it makes me happy to make him happy.”

There is karaoke. Julia and Joanne give a rendition of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart“, and afterward an unhappy Jimmy tells Joanne that their daughter spoke to him about “Julia’s sexual orientation”. This is all that Joanne can take, and she explodes. “What’s Julia’s sexual orientation?” she asks in exasperation. “Tell me, Mr. Sexologist, explain! She’s oriented vis-a vis what? Vis-a vis the wind? The sun? Julia’s a sunflower?”

Léa Mysius, who co-wrote the screenplay with Paul Guilhaume, explained Vicky’s relationship with her mother to Scott Roxborough of The Hollywood Reporter: “Vicky asks herself: ‘Why am I Vicky Solar and not someone else?’ As a child, this was something I was obsessed with. If my parents hadn’t met, I never would have been born. Or if I was conceived a second earlier, I wouldn’t be me. I wanted to put that question at the heart of the film…That’s how I came up with the scene of the fire, that image of the world before Vicky is conceived. And for Vicky, the question to her mother is not: ‘Would you have been happier if I was never born?’ but rather ‘Did you love me before I was born?'”

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Miscellaneous info

Firefighter Jeff explains to Jimmy that the total mass of ants on the planet exceeds that of humans, something that, according to Hannah Moore of the BBC, has not been true since the end of the eighteenth century (the time of the French Revolution).

The street where the Soler family lives is rue des Lilas, which is also a perfume described by its manufacturer as “the discreet almond-shaped facets of white lilac with the greenness of purple lilac after a downpour”. La rue des Lilas is also an anti-war song by Sylvain Girault.

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THE FIVE DEVILS can be streamed on MUBI