5X2 - R

It's a love story told backwards. About an average mid-thirties couple and their marriage. It starts with their divorce and moves down to the moment they fell in love.

It was superb, seeing this told backwards. Seeing how severed relationships can become, how they'll eventually grow into something malignant, no matter how people are doing their best, no matter how much they love each other.

And how people are so complex, that they never fall into what you expect of them, how lives are never neat as you want them to, feelings aren't something you can control, behaviours sometimes go unexplained, that sometimes people are simply that. Strange, odd, just people.

There's several examples of this throughout this film. After they get their divorce settled, they check into a hotel to have sex. And she ends up not wanting. And he ends up raping her. And, as she's leaving, he asks her if they should give it another go.

Of how, when they entertain his gay brother and his young, slutty boyfriend, the husband admits to have engaged in an orgy, with both men and women, while his wife encouraged and watched him, but never joined.

When she has their baby, how he's not up to visiting her in the hospital, and just stands outside, smoking, not being able to visit or talk to her, making up excuses for bad traffic and afterwards, while he stays in the car at night, suddenly calling her to tell her he loves her.

Or when, in their wedding night, the husband falls asleep and the wife goes outside and meets a stranger, with whom she has sex, returning to her room in the morning, holding her husband and telling him how much she loves him, while he didn't even notice she was gone all night, their wedding night. Just before seeing how much in love they seemed to be in their wedding ceremony, how lustful even, how smitten for one another, how truly happy.

Strange how people are, how people react, what people do, with no proper explanation, other than the fact that they are just people, leading their ordinary lives the best they can, and how somehow, even themselves can't understand what they're doing, why they do it, as if there's a deep, hidden side to them that makes them be what they are and not what they're supposed to be.