5 to 7
Dorothy Parker came up with that immortal line in 1928, expressing, under her “The New Yorker” pen name “Constant Reader,” what would turn out to be very much a minority opinion on A. A. Milne’s “The House at Pooh Corner.” It occurred to this reviewer as he attempted to grapple with the oppressive, bloodless, winsome gentility of “5 To 7,” a romantic comedy written and directed by Victor Levin and set in a New York City where its protagonist/narrator tells you in the first five minutes or so, “you’re never more than twenty feet away from someone you know, or someone you’re meant to know.”
This subtitle is about a guy named Brian who is apparently in his twenties and guess what? You won’t see him spending too much time riding the subway while watching this movie. The character Brian played by Anton Yelchin is an aspiring young writer whose study wall (even) holds rejection letters on paper from major outlets but all these Do NOT want do not hinder him from continuing (what?) His mom said that she was sorry when he told her about the latest publication’s refusal and he saw it as progress.
Sometime when he was out trying to get Life Experience for his fiction maybe one day. Brian meets Arielle (Bérénice Marlohe), an exquisite French woman who overplayed her hand with a Little Mermaid reference before cleverly baiting him into banter about how being a smoker in NY today means living like an expatriate; then she invites him again during the hours suggested by the movie title. Actually, Arielle isn’t unhappy; rather she is married but because she is French enough to take a lover like her husband does and although this offer initial offends Brian’s ethics, he finally decides on another amour.
That’s cool so far because there’s a long unbroken champagne-toast between Brian and Arielle in her beautiful apartment and she responds to one of Brian’s bromides by saying,” Maybe you should write fortune cookies.” Again, not so bad. However at some point before the halfway mark the film becomes something different altogether, and its make believe New York and French women start to look pretty corny. Even if characters are aware of the cliché ridden dialogue they speak particularly an exchange with a young editor (Olivia Thirlby) is painful in this regard awareness does not save or justify clichés.
It is no wonder that writer and director Levin, himself an old hand at television productions, has tried to make a movie similar to “Stolen Kisses” by his idol Truffaut, even embedding a clip from “Jules And Jim” into the film; but it is the stupefying nature of its plot that makes it look as though it were more polished version of “Killing Zoe.” In this 1993 film, for example, Eric Stoltz’s character who is nothing but a callow youth manages making an extremely beautiful call-girl girl fall in love with him within ten minutes.
It has been observed that Stoltz features in the movie as an editor named Jonathan Galassi, a name which happens to be identical to one of the prominent book guys in New York City; what is more strange is that instead of having another actor perform this role Levin asked famous people such as Julian Bond and Daniel Boulud to do cameo appearances on screen as themselves.
The most surprising cameos come from David Remnick editor in chief of actual New Yorker who showed up in person and told Brian about his fictional writing ability (as if we did not know that he was deeply inspired by Arielle’s affair) together with Brian’s parents played by Glenn Close and Frank Langella during a very confusing scene. At first I thought Remnick had lost some bet.
Then I realized that given how esoteric the world depicted here could become, no New Yorker editor would ever appear lifeless during any movie they would feature in; let alone one as poor as this one: all these things were playing back through my mind so fast. However when towards the end the picture ran out with several ill timed clichés about “perfect love,” its narrator intones (as Truffaut exposed time again in films like “Stolen Kisses”) and other characters starting to use dark rimmed glasses to convey the idea of time flying by, I could only remember that phrase of Dorothy Parker.
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