Eight-year-old Vicky has a gift as strange as it is fascinating: an ability to recognize, then reproduce, any smell. However, when the perfumes begin to generate images, Vicky delves into the troubled past of her mother, Joanne. These potentially fatal revelations also concern his father, Jimmy, as well as Julia, the latter’s sister, who has just reappeared after ten years of an absence that no one seems to want to explain to the child. In The Five DevilsVicky recomposes, thanks to her singular power, a family portrait that is more complex and tragic than she thought.
Unveiled at Cannes, this second feature film by Léa Mysius has the good fortune to captivate and bewitch in equal measure. Full of mystery and innuendo, the story is brilliantly constructed. It must be said that since his first film, AvaLouve d’or at the FNC in 2017, Léa Mysius has collaborated on the screenplays of many experienced filmmakers: Arnaud Desplechin (The Ghosts of Ishmael, Roubaix, a light), André Téchiné (Farewell to the night), Jacques Audiard (The Olympiads), Claire Dennis (The Stars at Noon)… Excuse a bit.
Be that as it may, the accomplishment is all the more remarkable The Five Devils is based on an intrinsically fragmented history. Indeed, the narrative structure is dependent on Vicky’s gift of smell, which shows successive snippets of events.
Divinatory dazzlings
One scent at a time, one secret at a time, what was experienced then buried long ago rises to the surface, like the smell of a corpse buried too shallowly (no, it’s not about those kinds of films , although The Five Devils willingly colored with supernatural notes). In a nice visual touch, Vicky appears in her visions without the people populating her divinatory flashes being able to see her.
As what has already happened becomes clearer, the content of what will happen seems uncertain…
Added to this is an insidiously hostile context. In fact, the action takes place in an alpine community closed in on itself and prone to racism.
The daughter of a white mother and a black father, Vicky is therefore doubly isolated. On the one hand, she suffers the racist jokes and the beatings of this gang of white children. On the other hand, she is more and more immersed in this intimate investigation concerning her parents and this aunt whose existence she was unaware of until recently.
All of this not only enriches the plot, but also the psychological profile of the heroine, embodied with incredible sensitivity and assurance by the young Sally Dramé. In the role of Joanne, this mother devoted to suspicious stoicism, Adèle Exarchopoulos is exceptional. Ditto for Moustapha Mbengue, enigmatic at the start, while his character of husband and father is deliberately relegated to the periphery, then moving as the truth emanates.
Neat approach
In the staging, Léa Mysius favors a camera that is sometimes floating, in keeping with the elusive nature of Vicky’s faculties, sometimes nervous and raw, when the characters hurl petty invective or painful truths at each other. A careful, concerted approach.
The opening sequence is representative in this: we see Vicky waking up from a nightmare showing her mother in front of a fire. In this respect, the (here positive) figure of the witch will often recur in the film (the heroine’s scent jars could contain potions). There follows a succession of aerial shots at the shining showing a forest road, a vast lake, then a town on the mountainside. Far from being a gratuitous wink, this allusion to Kubrick’s film skilfully sets the stage for a child’s story endowed with a power allowing him to access the past of places and people.
Unlike that The Five Devils never gives in to horror, preferring a subtle approach to fantasy. The result is a film that finds a way to be intriguing until the very end (that last shot!), in addition to exuding a poignant melancholy.