5 to 7

If Netflix ever perfects its algorithm for using a viewer’s tastes and past preferences to find the perfect movies for them, it still probably wouldn’t work for me. If I were to type in everything I love about cinematic stories, at least in terms of genre, subject matter, and character types, a cinematic match.com would certainly select Victor Levin’s directorial début 5 to 7 as a film I’d be bound to love. But I did not like this movie. The New York-based romantic drama tells the story of Brian Bloom (Anton Yelchin), a struggling young writer, who gets involved with a slightly older but far worldlier French woman named Arielle (Bérénice Marlohe). Their connection is instantaneous but complicated by the fact that she’s married with a family—thus their relationship can only take place during the protected hours of 5:00 to 7:00pm.

I never tire of exploring the issues and emotional conundrums raised here.  These matters of the heart are the stuff of life, especially when you’re Brian’s age. (See my essay on my favorite picture Roman Holiday for all the reasons why I think this is also the type of story that’s best suited for the medium of film.) But a movie along the lines of 5 to 7 lives or dies by its main character, and Brian is so maddeningly flat that the picture is dead on arrival.

There are a number of excellent ways to play wide-eyed and innocent, but Levin and Yelchin don’t bother finding a single one. Naive but sympathetic protagonists have been coming of age via romances with more experienced partners in pictures from Alice Adams (1935) to The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)—and older women have been forever altering the course of a young man’s emotional maturity from The Graduate (1967), Summer of '42 (1971), and Forty Carats (1973) to Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Prime (2005), and The Reader (2008) to name just a small handful.

But what makes each of these stories worthy of our attention and enables us to identify, connect, and get swept up in them is that the main characters are more than just inexperienced.  In 5 to 7, Brian begins and ends as a callow milquetoast we couldn’t care less about.  It is impossible to believe he’s a writer capable of getting anything published—certainly we get no sense that he has a way with words from his banal voiceovers which intrude at various moments during the film’s set-up and all but take over during its many endings.  But worse, nothing we’re shown makes credible the key narrative construct that Arielle would actually fall deeply in love with him.

Of course, this is meant as a story of clashing cultures. Brian is a New York Jew, and Arielle is an elegant, cosmopolitan, free-spirited European.  But the culture clash comes off as artificial because Brian is nothing more than the most rudimentary conception of “a young American” and Arielle is just a simplistic American idea of what a “sophisticated French woman” is like.

Perhaps if 5 to 9 were set 30 years ago I’d have an easier time accepting Brian’s difficulties navigating his situation. But, honestly, are there any twenty-somethings currently living in Manhattan who would find this love affair at all unusual? If so, I hope they all get to meet mature French women with clean, clear, old-fashioned ideas about open relationships rather than hooking up with any of their peers—seriously, how would Brian deal with dating any of Lena Dunham’s Girls?

The cast of 5 to 7 is an uneven ensemble. Yelchin, the star of Charlie Bartlett (2007), the Fright Night remake (2011), and the comparable romantic drama Like Crazy (2011)—not to mention his role as Mr. Chekov in the Star Trek reboots—is a fine actor but he brings literally nothing to his role. It’s not that he needs to play Brian as some kind of annoying millennial version of Woody Allen, but he does have to play something distinctive in order to be endearing. This lost puppy dog of a character doesn’t even seem especially Jewish, or New Yorkish, or bookish, or nostalgic for simpler times, or even intelligent. When his parents (played by Glenn Close and Frank Langella) enter the film, we get examples of how to effectively portray individuals of this background without descending into caricature or stereotype.

Marlohe, best known for playing Javier Bardem’s confederate Sévérine in Skyfall (2012), brings far more to the picture. Her Arielle possesses a graceful sophistication combined with an elusive melancholy, but she too fails to make credible some of the more awkwardly scripted and ham-fistedly photographed moments. Lambert Wilson brings all the right notes of distance, dignity, and charm to the small but important role of Arielle’s diplomat husband Valery. Unfortunately, Olivia Thirlby, playing Valery’s young lover Jane, can’t do the same with her shamefully underwritten part. 

I fully believe in the themes and conclusions of 5 to 7, but that’s only because I’m predisposed to them. This film does nothing to earn the sentiments it trades in, nor the seemingly profound statements it draws about relationships, the nature of love, and the creative process. In the end, most of it rings as hollow as an outdated hallmark card.