The Five Devils: The Scent of the Past

MOVIE INFO:

Eight-year-old Vicky has a mysterious gift: she can recreate any scent she comes across, even that of her beloved mother Joanne. When her estranged aunt suddenly returns to town, the invocation of her fragrance plunges the young girl back in time to unravel a past replete with family secrets and queer romance.

REVIEW:

Vicky (Sally Drame), the multiracial child at the center of the French director Lea Mysius eerie emotional drama The Five Devils, is preternaturally gifted with an acute canine nose. She can track her mother Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) blindfolded from acres of forest; smell the scent of chlorinated pool water and sloshed coffee in the pages of a yellowing journal.

Smell is a hard scent to describe verbally and cinematically. Mysius depicts it eliptically. The whiff of personal aroma floating in the air creates the mystique of the movie, which is part lesbian romance and supernatural psychodrama.

The trouble starts when Julia (Swala Emati), the sister of Vicky’s dad, Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue) reappears in his life ten years after her renowned pyromaniac incident and court ordered sentence to a mental institution. The event left Joanne’s friend, Nadine (Daphne Patakia) permanently disfigured on half her face. Julia’s return creates an unspoken uneasy tension between Julia and Jimmy’s wife, Joanne.

As the mainly sexual tension and angst between Julia and Joanne grows, Vicky’s abilities take on a new dimension. Julia’s scent causes Vicky to experience visions of the past. We see them in woozy flashbacks that exposes the small French mountain town’s unspoken racism and homophobia. Julia and Joanne were both promising gymnasts. The townfolk blame Julia for Joanne’s now lesbianism. In turn, Vicky is bullied by her school peers, whose weird canned scent concoctions have them seeing her as a witch.

Director Mysius cleverly relies on color, physicality and some heavy duty symbolism to show these free floating tensions: the repressed Joanna swims daily in bone chilling waters; Julia still lights things aflame. The personal frictions are never verbalized. It’s all reflective of the confusing piecing process of Vicky coalescing what she sees, feels and smells into a coherent reality- and a symbol for growing up. In the adults feelings she gets a scent of her future self.