With Ethan Hawke

France/Poland/United Kingdom, 2011
Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Screenwriters: Pawel Pawlikowski, Douglas Kennedy
Cinematographer: Ryszard Lenczewski
Editor: David Charap
Composer: Max de Wardener
Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Ethan Hawke, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
Running Time: 83 minutes

American novelist Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) moves to Paris to renew his relationship with his estranged wife and daughter. The reunion does not go well, a thief steals his money, and Tom lands in a seedy hostel. To pay for his room and board, he agrees to work as a night guard for the proprietor (Samir Guesmi) in a warehouse with strange goings-on. One evening, at a literary gathering, Tom meets Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas), a worldly and enigmatic translator who transfixes him. Their passionate affair coincides with a series of inexplicable events, and Tom’s sense of reality becomes increasingly deranged.

“Befitting a filmmaker whose life saw him move from his native Poland to Germany, Italy and then finally England as a youngster, Pawel Pawlikowski’s sensibility is a unique blend of Eastern and Western European culture. After making two highly impressive, solidly English films — the neorealist Last Resort and the lyrical My Summer of Love — Pawlikowski has set The Woman in the Fifth in Paris, and given it a strange, discombobulated feel that owes much to Kafka. Here that most-filmed city takes on the unsettling mood and tone of an Eastern-European metropolis; Pawlikowski’s camera shoots both the streets and the apartment interiors in a distinctive way … Pawlikowski pushes his material in a surprising way, pulling the rug out from underneath his audience and forcing us to readjust to a series of startling revelations. Hawke and Scott Thomas are note-perfect, while Paris acts as a character in its own right” (Piers Handling, Toronto Film Festival).