L’Amant Double (The Double Lover)
Director: François Ozon
Talent: Marine Vacth, Jérémie Renier, Jacqueline Bisset
Released: 1 June
L’enfant terrible François Ozon is back with an erotic psychosexual thriller, the genre of which more or less all but died out once we entered the 21st century. Ozon has decided to pull out all the old De Palma/Verhoeven/Cronenberg tricks that he can muster here, and as a result, he dumps a big slab of Gallic silliness and uneven gender stereotyping on our 2018 tables. It’s a curious, wavering, hit-and-miss affair.
Marine Vacth plays Chloé, a lonely, fragile and disturbed woman who has an on-going stomach ache which has been prescribed as nothing more than psychosomatic. As a result, she consults a psychoanalyst. Love soon blossoms. But nightmares and visions torment her. When she discovers a secret about her psychoanalyst lover Paul (Jérémie Renier), things slowly begin to unravel as she goes deeper and deeper down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Ozon means well and a lot of The Double Lover is very watchable. The dialogue may be very clumsy at times and the unending dewy Bambi eyes and forlorn expression of Vacth a bit too much, but, like her character, the viewer is also drawn onward with the hopes of a concrete resolution. However, things don’t quite go, well, anywhere in that regard.
There will be much talk of the sex scenes and pegging and that opening shot which left this reviewer guffawing at the sheer (vulgarity? daring?) chutzpah of Ozon. But really when it comes down to it, The Double Lover won’t escape comparisons to Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (a much better film), nor how Cronenberg effectively ratcheted up the tension and drama to its grand finale while Ozon sabotaged his own film with too many dream sequences and an ending that is impossible to decipher.
Words: Shane O’Reilly
