“A couple’s bliss doesn’t really inspire me,” Francois Ozon says of his new movie, “5×2.” Many of Mr. Ozon’s films are sardonic, at times brutal, examinations of love’s pathologies; in “Criminal Lovers” and “Water Drops on Burning Rocks” (2000), coupledom is – sometimes literally – a form of imprisonment. In “5×2” the dyad isn’t quite so dire – which makes it all the more affecting. Abandoning (at least temporarily) the mantle of queer provocateur and diva worshipper, Mr. Ozon shows himself to be a compassionate if gimlet-eyed couples’ counselor.

In each of his eight films, Mr. Ozon has changed his style, often advancing but sometimes painfully regressing. His first featurette, “See the Sea” (1997), a chilling, nimble amalgam of sapphic dread and desire, was followed by the silly “Sitcom” (1998), a vapid spoof of gay consumerism. His masterpiece, “Under the Sand” (2000), is not only one of the most poignant films about loss and mourning but also a deeply felt valentine to its star, Charlotte Rampling. But he followed it with two enormous disappointments: “8 Women” (2002), a screechy Gallic grande-dame smack down, and “Swimming Pool” (2003), a murder mystery that contradicts its own logic and spins out of control.

With “5×2,” his most emotionally mature work since “Under the Sand,” Mr. Ozon seems to be back on track. The movie is not as sublimely melancholic as the earlier film, but it amply displays the director’s talents for deftly chronicling the slow but steady accumulations of humiliations, betrayals, and abandonment that tear two people who once loved each other apart.

Its narrative, told in reverse chronological order in five discrete episodes, traces the dissolution of the marriage of Gilles (Stephane Freiss) and Marion (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a 30-ish couple with a young son. The film opens with the haggard-looking, glassy-eyed Gilles and Marion listening to a divorce lawyer rattle off a list of articles from the civil code and byzantine arrangements for child visitation. Documents signed, the duo retires to a dismal hotel room for a disastrous, rageful last hurrah.

Cut to a few years earlier: After putting their beloved toddler to bed, Gilles and Marion host Christophe (Antoine Chappey), Gilles’s older gay brother, and his cute club-kid boyfriend, Mathieu (Marc Ruchmann), for dinner. In his cups, Gilles gleefully reveals his one moment of infidelity as Marion silently seethes. Before this, Gilles refuses to be by his wife’s hospital bedside when she goes into early labor. On their own wedding-night bacchanal, Marion leaves her slumbering spouse for a midnight stroll and an impromptu make-out session. As the very first encounter between the couple – at an Italian sea resort – makes clear that both passion and deception would dominate their troubled life together.

Throughout his career, the movie mad Mr. Ozon has lovingly cribbed – with mixed results – from the almighty auteurs: from Chabrol in “See the Sea” to Fassbinder in “Water Drops on Burning Rocks” to Sirk in “8 Women.” “5×2” cannily combines the saturnine sensibility of Bergman – “Scenes From a Marriage” is an obvious reference – with the neurotically sanguine escapism of Rohmer’s summer films (the presence of Francoise Fabian, who starred in Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s,” as Marion’s mother makes the connection concrete). By balancing sun and moon, Mr. Ozon tempers his previous pessimistic disposition toward coupledom with the very adult, complex realization that the misery two people share is often interrupted by adventure, tremendous intimacy, and hope.

Men are usually superfluous in Mr. Ozon’s films. When male protagonists do appear, they’re often either horny, sexually curious teens or creepy patriarchs. Although deeply flawed, Gilles is at least a recognizable, multidimensional character, one who can shower his son with tremendous tenderness and then, a few hours later, bring his wife to tears.

Mr. Ozon has made his name with his distaff casting, whether resurrecting Ms. Rampling or bringing international attention to nymphet Ludivine Sagnier (who has made three films with the director) or assembling a passel of superstar femmes (Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert) for “8 Women.” Yet Marion, superbly played by Ms. Bruni Tedeschi, is a new kind of heroine for Mr. Ozon: an anti-diva who both chases after her desires and weathers crushing disappointments. In other words, a more mature role, created by a more mature filmmaker.