Me and the Devil Walking Side by Side: On the Evocative Fragrances of The Five Devils

THE FIVE DEVILS / Les Cinque Diables 
(Léa Mysius, 2022, France, 96 minutes) 

It's hard to resist a film that opens with a slow-burn cover of Robert Johnson's eerie 1937 blues lament "Me and the Devil," a song I know best from Gil Scott-Heron's glitchy, heartfelt rendition on his final album, 2010's I'm New Here. 

As the song plays, the opening credits unspool over scenes of a very pretty, very remote village in the Rhône-Alpes, after which filmmaker Léa Mysius introduces Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos, a beautiful woman with a goofy smile that rarely materializes here), a pool aerobics instructor at the Five Devils Sports Center. Her Senegalese-born husband, Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), is a firefighter and their eight-year-old daughter, Vicky (Sally Dramé), accompanies Joanne when she teaches class. 

A wiry kid with a nimbus of curls and big, expressive eyes, Vicky also times Joanne as she practices swimming across a frigid lake and back. Later, when asked why she does this, Joanne explains, "I like it." 

When they walk through the woods, Vicky collects items that she stores in mason jars. These olfactory snapshots reflect the way she senses the world--she's even bottled her mother's scent in a jar labeled "Joanne." It's fortunate that Vicky, who is biracial, has a good relationship with her mother, because classmates make fun of her. It's also fortunate for Joanne, because she lacks any discernible social life.

It isn't initially clear why Joanne, a former beauty queen, is so glum, or why the spark has gone out of her marriage, but her expression grows glummer still when Jimmy's estranged, possibly alcoholic sister Julia (Swali Amati) returns to town. Vicky claims that she smells like peat whisky. 

Mysius, co-writer with cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, does an excellent job in patiently constructing the setup piece by piece: establishing the family dynamic, exploring their differences from the larger community, and then adding an unexpected catalyst to throw a spanner into the already-unsteady works. It isn't her first script; Mysius also co-wrote Ava, her feature-length debut, in addition to Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District (with Céline Sciamma) and Claire Denis's Stars at Noon.

While furtively rifling through Julia's belongings, Vicky finds a strange-smelling bottle, and places it in her pocket. Later, she fills a jar with substances that smell like Julia, including a splash of the mysterious liquid, shakes it up, takes a whiff, and passes out. When she wakes up, she's in a completely different place--and time. 

Soon, Vicky finds herself having visions of Joanne, Jimmy, and Julia as teenagers. Mysius doesn't mention race directly, but Vicky and Julia are often depicted as the only Black women in any space they occupy, though their differences go beyond race, since they share a unique psychic bond. 

From these visions, Vicky learns things about her parents that she didn't know, including the nature of Joanne's relationships with Julia and Nadine (Benedetta's Daphne Patakia), a Five Devils colleague with significant facial scarring. As teenagers, the three were part of the same gymnastic troupe, and Joanne met Jimmy through Julia. Beyond the supernatural angle, The Five Devils is a story about family and generational trauma. 

It's also a story about small town intolerance. Just as the villagers see Vicky as an outsider, they see Julia the same way. They remember her from things that happened 10 years ago. If anything, her presence ramps up their intolerance in ways that recall Stephen King/Brian De Palma's Carrie, albeit on a more modest scale. 

As Vicky mixes up more potions, she has more visions, but she doesn't just see Julia in the past--Julia sees her in the future. In the present, Julia warns Vicky that she's opening up a hornet's nest, but it helps the girl to understand why her parents are so glum. In the end, though, Vicky is just a kid, and it’s up to the adults to address their long buried secrets. 

If Mysius explains the family mystery, she doesn't explain the power that Vicky and Julia share. In that respect, The Five Devils isn't a conventional horror movie, because Vicky uses her heightened sense of smell for understanding rather than for taking revenge on name-calling brats. 

Her understanding comes to include same-sex attraction, something this attractive, if oppressive town seems as likely to view with suspicion as racial and cultural differences. The film's conclusion is open-ended enough to suggest that the family members just might get their shit together now that they can no longer live in denial. 

The essential story is as old as time, since there's nothing new about unhappy couples who would rather remain unhappy than face the truth, but Mysius finds a novel way to reveal it. Though Exarchopoulos, versatile star of The Class and Blue Is the Warmest Color, provides the marquee name, most everything plays out through Vicky's eyes, and Sally Dramé gives the most engaging performance, not least because, in a film about inheritance, this bright spirit doesn't seem to have inherited her parents' tendency towards gloominess. If there's a devil in this film--it isn't her. 

And if the ending doesn't quite fulfill the promise of the beginning, Mysius and cast, including newcomers Dramé and Amati, conjure up a riveting atmosphere. Low on scares, The Five Devils is rich with intrigue. 

 

The Five Devils opens at The Grand Illusion on Friday, April 21. It premieres on streaming, through MUBI, on May 12. Images: IMDb (Sally Dramé in faceted shades and Adèle Exarchopoulos with Moustapha Mbengue), Film Affinity (Exarchopoulos), MUBI ( Exarchopoulos), and Unifrance (Exarchopoulos with Swali Amati and a Bonnie Tyler number).