Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 is a romantic drama about a young writer in Manhattan that could be a superhero flick if its leading man wore tights. It’s as much a triumph of boyish wish fulfillment as Peter Parker swinging on skyscrapers. Brian (Anton Yelchin) is one of those suffering artists whose great tragedy is that at 24, he’s yet to be published by the New Yorker. Or, really, that he’s yet to live a life worth writing about. Brian lives like a monk, wallpapers his room in rejection letters, and seems one step away from flagellating himself with the cord of his MacBook. How he supports himself is unclear. What is clear is that we’re supposed to cut our hearts open for the poor dear who deserves to become one of the great writers of his generation simply because he wants it so badly.
One day on the street, Brian spots an older beauty named Arielle (Bérénice Marlohe) smoking a smelly European cigarette outside of the St. Regis hotel. He crosses his fingers and attempts his clumsy français; as luck would have it, she’s a French model, now retired. The two have one of those affected conversations that people have when they imagine themselves to be characters on a page. After a few minutes of chatter, Arielle invites him to meet her outside the hotel exactly one week later.
Thus begins their love affair, which is made of forays to the rented room upstairs and lectures on what the French do right that Yankees get hopelessly wrong — a list that includes evaluating art, drinking wine, going to the movies and having an affair. Arielle is a married mother of two, but Brian is aghast over the ethics of a Parisian 5-to-7 romance, so named for the pre-dinner hours when a spouse’s whereabouts are vague. Arielle’s diplomat husband (Lambert Wilson) is fine with it. He brings his own mistress (Olivia Thirlby) home for dinner.
To Brian — and to writer-director Levin — Arielle is the unforgettable romance, the one that will forever shape him into a Man With Something to Say. To us, Arielle seems like a schoolmarm lecturing her pupil. This could work if the film were a satire on the cultural arrogance of Old Europe. There is truth in 5 to 7’s conflict between the prudish American and the relativistic French, but holding on to the idea that France and America are irreconcilably different seems musty in the Internet age.
The larger issue is that there’s no credibility to Arielle and Brian’s romance. We get why he likes her — who wouldn’t? But what does she see in this nine-years-younger naif whom she treats like a slow child? At a posh dinner party, he looks like an embarrassing twit horning in at the adults’ table. And in casting Yelchin, a dead ringer for an icon of Saint Sebastian, and pushing the sex scenes a tasteful 25 feet from the camera, the film rejects the idea that this affair is about physical heat.
Levin inserts montages of the love inscriptions on the bench plaques of Central Park, a sweet touch with shades of When Harry Met Sally.... Yet Rob Reiner saw the foibles in his leads. By the end of 5 to 7, we’re sick to death of rooting for Brian to channel his improbable affair into a writing career and become the hero he’s meant to be: another privileged male wunderkind who has it all, including a lasting love that he never earned.