The Five Devils

Director: Léa Mysius (France). Year of Release: 2022

South-East France, at the foot of the alps. The Five Devils are the local nickname for 5 large local mountains and the name of the sports centre where Joanne works as a swimming instructor. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, first we have a dream, of the backs of young women in gymnast gear watching a blazing inferno. One of the woman – the only black one – turns round and stares at the camera. A black girl wakes us, obviously concerned by the contents of her dream.

Now we can go to the sports centre, where Joanne is a former young gymnast and beauty queen who is now leading an aqua aerobics class for elderly women. As Joanne puts the women through their paces, next to her, at the side of the pool, 10 year old Vicky is imitating her actions, her face full of the joy of taking part. We learn that Vicky, who unlike Joanne is black, is Joanne’s daughter and see a photo in Joanne’s office of Joanne in a wedding dress and a tall black man in uniform.

Joanne’s father asks her if she’s still having sex with her husband Jimmy, a quiet but slightly dull firefighter from Senegal. Joanne refuses to answer, asking dad how he can be so intrusive, but her face betrays it all. Worse, Jimmy’s sister Julia is back in town for the first time in 10 years, and Joanne is not looking forward to her return. Other villagers are even more hostile to Julia, calling her the “pyromaniac dyke”, “batshit crazy”, and worse.

Vicky is being bullied at school, where she is the only Black kid. She is mocked for her hair and called “toilet brush” my the other kids. When Joanne leaves her alone in the car, the other kids climb on the roof and beat on the windows. For all the time Joanne spends alone with her daughter, she seems unaware of the girl’s daily experience. As Joanne struggles to cope through life, Vicky spends a lot of time alone in her room.

Once a day, Joanne takes Vicky down to the local lake, where she is oiled up and swims in the 7° water. Vicky is given a stopwatch to time the swim, as if Joanne stays in the water for more than 20 minutes, there is a serious danger of developing cramps and drowning. It is a simple mother-daughter bonding session which the young girl seems to enjoy very much. For Joanne, it seems to be one of the few enjoyable experiences of her dull life.

Not all the plotting is quite as simple as this. Out in the woods, Vicky tells her mum that she has an extremely sensitive sense of smell. They test this out, and a blindfolded Vicky is able to find Joanne from a long distance away. Added to this, Vicky is collecting smells of different people (including “Maman 1”, “Maman 2”, and “Maman 3”). It’s not quite eye of newt and toe of frog, but it does contain boiled eggs, a strange green liquid, and extract of boiled crow.

We gradually discover that Joanne and Julia used to have a thing, and Vicky is worried that her parents’ marriage will suffer. She steals a strange liquid from Julia’s bag and adds it to the whisky that Julia drinks regularly to produce an essence of Julia. But when Vicky takes a sniff of this liquid, she passes out and wakes up in the middle of the road some way away. She is troubled with visions of Joanne and Julia’s past.

This is the point where The Five Devils takes its leave from any usual sense of plot and structure. Timelines are mixed, some scenes are repeated, and you are often not sure whether you are watching a dream, a memory, or “real life”. Or, at least, I got confused by all this. Maybe there are people who are cleverer than me who fully understood what was going on first time round. This obscurity is slightly annoying, but doesn’t ruin the film.

Things all come to a head, as they often do, at the karaoke. A drunk Joanne insists that she and Julia go up to sing Total Ecleepse of zee Art. As the two women stare at each other singing lines like “And I need you now tonight And I need you more than ever And if you only hold me tight We’ll be holding on forever ”, Jimmy looks increasingly uncomfortable. Julia stands in contrast to all the drabness of Joanne’s current life as a dutiful mother and wife.

What to make of it all? The Five Devils tries to do a lot, maybe too much. The various plot strands don’t always easily cohere together, and I occasionally found myself internally shouting at the screen: “why are you showing me this?” Some scenes seems arbitrary and unnecessary, and the time travel bits never quite did it for me. You got the feeling that someone is trying just a little too hard, and I think the film could have benefited from some judicial cutting to add focus.

And yet, the film was always compelling and well acted throughout. Adèle Exarchopoulos (her out of Blue is the Warmest Colour) was superb as Joanne, as, indeed, were the rest of the cast. While at times, you might wonder what exactly is going on, at no point was the story boring or uninteresting. And, as the film is a cry of rage against stifling orthodoxy, the fact that some of the plotting doesn’t conform to standard expectations is not the worst thing.

The Five Devils is occasionally frustrating, but always takes you along with it. And – plot spoiler – it was not the horror film that I was expecting and devils play an entirely marginal role. Next they’ll be telling us that Raging Bull doesn’t have any cattle scenes.