Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers and Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth

The Garvey clan was like the old Soviet Union, a once mighty power that had dissolved into a bunch of weak and cranky units.
Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers, St. Martin's Press, 2011

I admit that I read Perrotta's book because it is being used as the basis for a TV series, starting next week, put together by Damon Lindelof of Lost fame; I liked Lost, at least the first few years.  The book focuses on the Garvey family in Mapleton, a family that did not lose members in the Sudden Departure, when millions of people all over the world suddenly vanished, but is nonetheless falling apart because of it.  The Leftovers shows how much suburbia and the family have been falling apart, a tendency accelerated by the disappearance of so many people, people who seemed to have nothing in common; the book is sometimes funny and often sad, as family rifts come out in the open while everyone tries in their own way to understand what cannot be understood.

Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth (2012) is appealing and appalling in the same way the films of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni and Polanski were in my college days, when we would see films by these filmmakers and discuss for hours their beauty and what was "real" and what was not.  In Pawlikowski's film a writer comes to Paris to see his daughter (it is never revealed why he is not allowed to by the courts), gets robbed of all his money and takes a mysterious job and a room in a seedy hotel, eventually meeting and falling in love with a woman who seems to have died in 1991.  One can identify with the frustration of not seeing one's child and getting caught in a foreign country without money or the ability to speak the language well.  The film captures the pain of being adrift in an off-the-beaten-track part of the beautiful city of Paris as a writer tries to write his second novel, tries unsuccessfully to see his daughter and, perhaps, descends into madness.