User Reviews

One reason I'd like to see 'L'Amant Double' for a second time, is just to count the number of scenes featuring mirrors. A rough estimate: somewhere between twenty and thirty. Sometimes there are two or three mirror scenes in a time span of just a few minutes. A few of them really stand out in a cinematographic way. In one scene, we see a conversation between two people, but it seems as if they are talking to each other's mirror image: they are never shown talking directly to each other.

The symbolism of it all is clear. In 'L'Amant Double', lead character Chloé is in love with twin brothers. At least, that's what she thinks. And that's what we think. Unless the twins are really two sides of the same personality. But two sides of which personality exactly? His, or a projection of hers? What is real, what is imagined? Director François Ozon plays the game of mirrors perfectly, and keeps it up until the very end. When you think it's all clear, there are still some strange things. Which one of the twin brothers was the smoker again?

The film is very stylish. Ozon has made the most of the locations. In the museum where Chloé works as a guard, outrageous art is being exposed. It's a perfect backdrop for some visually beautiful scenes. The clothing, the hairdo's, the furniture: everything is done in the best of Parisian tastes.

There's much to enjoy in 'L'Amant Double', for different kinds of moviegoers. It is a thriller of some sorts, with the suspense building up until the last few minutes. It's also a psychological drama, with lots of twists and turns. And in the very end, there's even a little bit of horror. But overall, this is a very French film, with some kinky scenes and a nice amount of Parisian elegance.

Chloé is 25 and alone. Her only friend is her cat. She quit the modeling world and is struggling to find other work. Her physical ailments are diagnosed as psychosomatic and gets sent to psychiatrist Dr Paul Meyer. She gets better. They fall in love and she moves in with him. She discovers some disturbing facts and starts seeing double. Jacqueline Bisset plays duo mother roles. Other actors also play duo roles.

The themes and the concepts remind me of Dead Ringers. Director François Ozon is doing a similar story even down to the gynecology and Cronenberg's body horror style. I assume this to be a work of love. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. He does throw in a big twist at the end. I really like the absorption idea but I do not like the hallucination idea. It wipes away most of the movie. It's all a dream and the movie is not better for it. It would be much better to keep both ideas. The ending should be Chloé in prison dealing with all her losses and caring for an imaginary baby.

After having seen last week the 2016 "Frantz" I continued yesterday my (François) Ozon cure with "The Double Lover" (or "L'amant double" in original) the latest film of the French director, a film that was present also in the 2017 competition at the Cannes festival. Both movies deal with issues of identity, truth and deception and how these can impact relationships between men and women. This is were similarities stop. There are many differences and almost all in favor of the 2016 film.

The story which is 'freely' inspired by a novel by Joyce Carol Oates (which has already originated a movie by David Cronenberg) starts as the story about a relationship between a psychoanalyst and his patient that turns into a strange and uneasy love affair. While the relation between shrink and patient needs to be based on trust and truth, in this case the contrary happens, as each of the two characters avoids fully sharing their feelings, hides things from the past, speaks half truths or plain lies. They seem that they cannot work as a couple on any plan. The bad start of the relation develops to worse and the odd things that happen on screen are complicated by having them told in a mix of genres - French art film with Paris and a museum of disturbing modern art as background, erotic thriller, horror and guilt in the Hitchcock and Polanski traditions. All these get together in a 'bouillion' that becomes less and less credible, up to the point that the story cannot be solved but by explaining that all was some kind of dementia delirium with very prosaic physiological roots. What should have been a sophisticated game of mirrors becomes a multiplication of images by mirrors disposed in a chaotic manner. To make things worse, the ending makes the mistake of explaining too much in sordid details. Hard to believe that the film with this ending comes in the filmography of Ozon just after "Frantz" with the wonderful ambiguity of its open ending.

Acting is also problematic. Ozon's choice of actors seems sometimes odd (not only here) because they are characters that do not feel well in their own skins. In this case he chose Marine Vacth (his discovery in "Young & Beautiful ") for a role that needs more expressiveness and fragility than what the actress delivered on screen. There is no chemistry between her and either of the two selves (or twin brothers) played by Jérémie Renier . I will never complain about seeing again Jacqueline Bisset in a film and I appreciate Ozon's creating in every film of his strong and interesting feminine characters that break the stereotypes, but her role or maybe roles (another odd double) seem to be wasted talent here.

"The Double Lover" never reaches at cinematographic level its ambitions. The jury at Cannes 2017 deserves an award for not giving - despite the names of the director and the cast - any award to this movie.

Although this is a riveting, spectacular, wholly engaging thriller, upon reflection we can conclude that almost everything that happens is in heroine Chloe's mind. One key pointer is the surreal museum in which she works as a guard. The ex-model - an object of vision - now watches people. The setting is where people read the art around them for improved understanding of themselves and life. The "Blood and Flesh" exhibition, the monstrous sculpture of overhead roots, the gallery's vast white spaces, the sculptures that anticipate the fetus-like cysts later removed from Chloe's womb, all point to the fantasy element in her psychodrama. In the pre-credit shot she is having her hair cut. She transforms herself into a more androgynous look. Her hair covers her eyes, then is trimmed to expose them. The action opens on her medical exam, first with a shot of a vagina, then a close-up of her eye, registering pain, perhaps tears. The establishing shot shows Chloe in the stirrups, her doctor peering between Chloe's legs. This establishes her central tensions: her sexuality and her vision of herself. When she goes to her first psychiatric appointment she climbs a vertiginous eye-like spiralling staircase. The stomach pains her doctor can't explain turns out to be a psychological issue around her womb. Chloe is a divided psyche, harbouring a profound sense that she consumed the twin in the womb when she was born. For that she is driven to punish herself.The cause isn't known until she herself is found to have a fetus-like cyst beside the fetus in her own womb. Her relationship with therapist Paul operates on the level of event. But his twin brother, fellow shrink and more violent, effective and punishing lover Louis is Chloe's projection. She imputes to Paul the divided and conflicted self she herself bears. That elaborates her admission that "When you look at me that way, I feel I exist." So, too, her mother is doubled by the Madame Schenker she imagines visiting, who discloses the supposed twins' ruin of her innocent daughter Sandra (whom Chloe also sees as herself). Minor doublings abound. The same actor plays Chloe's gynaecologist and the therapist Dr Wexler she claims to visit. The imagined Madame Schenker is herself doubled by Chloe's neighbour Rose, another woman with an invalid daughter, the girl's bedroom frozen in time, with cats both stuffed and statues to echo Chloe's missing Milo. Louis' office is a glossier double of Paul's, unrealistically opening into the bedroom for his advanced therapy. The Christmas party discussion of phantom twins explains Chloe's sense of having absorbed a sibling in the womb. The background of American pop songs concludes with a particularly pointed lyric, sung by Elvis Presley. Presley himself admitted to a lifelong connection to his twin brother Aron, who died at birth. The film itself has a doubled kind of twin. It's adapted from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which David Cronenberg filmed as Dead Ringers.

Introducing his film "L'amant double" at the 2017 London Film Festival, director François Ozon informed the British audience that to the French we Brits have a reputation for kinkiness - therefore, he hoped we would enjoy his film.

Plagued by stomach pains that she is told are all in her head, Chloé (Marine Vacth) starts seeing psychiatrist Paul (Jérémie Renier with awful yellow beard and messy hairstyle). The pair fall in love (so much so that he's willing to let her use a dildo on him), but soon after they set up home together Chloé discovers that Paul has a twin brother whom he has never mentioned. Intrigued, she sets up a meeting with the twin, Louis (Renier again, with same awful yellow beard but neater hair) and before long she's boffing both brothers. But for what reason did Paul disown his twin, and how will that impact on Chloé's own fragile mental state?

So what is this film - psychological thriller? Mystery? Comedy, even (Myriam Boyer's cat-obsessed neighbour)? Ozon has produced such an entertaining film that it does not seem to matter. Which is not to say the film is flawless - I am not convinced the final explanation is 100% watertight; and French films where women lose their grip on reality are ten a penny.

Vacth is an engaging lead and Renier constructs two distinct characters as the twins (and, like Vacth, engages in a decent amount of on-screen nudity, which is always welcome). A surprise to me was the splendid performance of Jacqueline Bisset in her own dual role - it is a very nice turn indeed.

In the case of this film, it is that when it seems that it is talking about a thriller, it goes to a drama and then to fear and at the end with so many twists, so many dreams, you do not know if the director himself knows what he is telling you .

It's too twisted to have any logic.

The actors could be said that they are fine, if we knew what they want to tell us, but as we do not know, we do not know if they are good or where they are going.

Photography, the truth is that in the interiors at night, it is beautiful, on the street it is not pretty and if it is inside during the day it is normal. The problem is that since you do not know what you are seeing, photography does not help you to value it either.

The work of the director, telling that he has not known how to take the film to any point, that he does not know how to narrate with the camera. All the plans are simple and do not say anything. It bores because you do not know what you're seeing, it's not very good.

When you finish seeing it you will think that you did not take it away.

"L'amant double" or "Double Lover" is a French/Belgian co-production in the French language from 2017 and the most recent release by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker François Ozon and he is also one of the writers here who adapted the novel this film is based on. He was around the age of 50 when he made it and reunites with Marine Vacth, his muse maybe you could say already as she is really at the very center of this 105-minute film from start to finish. This sure was an interesting film that oozes creativity constantly and as always with Ozon there are many really beautiful and sensual shots here and you find out right away at the very beginning that Ozon still isn't scared of touching taboos as we see the close-up as a vagina, strap-on sex and there is a great deal of nudity in here and also visual references about a girl's period, also the core subject of one of Ozon's earlier short films by the way. "Frantz" was a very different work for Ozon and here this movie feels like his usual approach again. Vacth is of course an absolute stunner and I am usually not into short-haired girls, so this is a huge compliment coming from me. She looks like the young Juliette Binoche minus a bit of cuteness plus a bit of hotness I'd say. But performance-wise, Jérémie Renier is maybe even more impressive handling the difficult effort of playing two characters in this movie. Or is he really? That's the question you will ask yourself quickly after the young woman runs into the doppelganger for the first time. And from that moment on, nothing is what it seems. I really loved the mirror references and they were among the very highlights of the film. The cat references weren't bad either and generally the ways in which Ozon made obvious how different the 2 men are: the money paying moments, the one who is in charge of talking during these sessions, the birthday behavior etc. Sadly, as much wit and beauty may be included here, Ozon's constant attempts at making this special, packed with symbolisms, metaphors etc. feel sometimes too much. One good example would be when we see Bisset being the mother of the protagonist suddenly. But the cat jewellery item on her was interesting again. Nonetheless there are moments when the film just tries to be a bit too deep and smart and significant for its own good and the result is that it does feel a bit fake and for the sake of it, maybe even pretentious. A thumbs-up goes to the neighbor and the actress Myriam Boyer did an amazing job combining strangeness with kindness and you never knew what she really was. An absolute scene stealer in my opinion. Back to the mirrors I mentioned earlier, I also want to say it is such a shame that at the very end they really messed up on that regard too with the very last scene/shot unfortunately as this was really the one and only moment where the mirror reference felt weak and obsolete, but it stays in the mind because it just happens before the closing credits roll in. All in all, I would say that this was certainly an enjoyable watch, but it could have been much better too with stronger focus and less going all-in. The longer it went, the more you became as confused as the protagonist I guess. I think as a family drama with thriller elements it could have worked best. The psychological horror and mystery genre moments did the least for me and they were pretty awkward at times. I don't know how much Ozon took directly out of the novel, but I do believe that dialogue writing may not have been his biggest strength as there were moments when the talking did not feel too authentic. You will realize them when you see them, maybe consider completely others than myself that way. For me one of these moments was when we see her stand up to the other brother during the scene that results in the breaking glass from the mirror (once again). Nonetheless, I believe the positive is more frequent than the negative, especially in the film's first half and I recommend checking it out. Not a must-see or one of Ozon's very best, but a decent achievement as a whole. Thumbs-up and I give it a positive recommendation. Oh yeah and as for the reference in the title of my review, I certainly had this feeling during the domination scenes with the second brother, but of course I cannot say if this really inspired Ozon. That's really all now though. Watch this one if you like French non-comedy films.

Ozon's genre practice DOUBLE LOVER joins a mini-cinematic tributary fixating on and delving into the unwonted conditions of twins, like many a notable antecedent, say David Cronenberg's DEAD RINGERS (1988), Ozon finds the film a scientific bedrock in "parasitic twin", a medical term that hasn't reached a mass comprehension and mines profoundly into the psychological implications stemmed from it.

The plot is a reductive two-hander (or three-hander if one counts separately Jérémie Renier's Gemini embodiment of both Paul and Louis), and the premise falls right into an arid narrative device that forcefully brings Chloé (Vacth), a young woman who has been pestered by unspecified abdominal pain since childhood, and her shrink Paul together as a romantic couple, afterward, she alights on that he has an identical twin brother Louis, also a psychotherapist (coincidence? hell no!), whose very existence Paul refuse to acknowledge. Chloé is intrigued to seek out the truth by engaging carnal knowledge with Louis, their rumpy-pumpy is more violent and hardcore than the one with Paul, and she even fantasizes that she is having a threesome with both (not before the twins sharing a steamy kissing scene, very Ozonesque, that includes a later gender-switch sexual experiment to point up the mutability in today's masculine sexuality and slake a typical female fantasy), and in a split second, herself is clearly divided into two identical persons, yes the clues are all blatantly strewn, and the movie is larded with tried-and-tested old tricks like imagery juxtapositions and mirroring compositions to elaborate Chloé's innate psycho-sexual desire (Philippe Rombi's unheimlich score is a germane sound motif, blaring up whenever the story goes uncanny).

Chloé's quagmire is predictably complicated by Paul's marriage proposal and Louis' obsession when she realizes she is pregnant and the child might be either Paul or Louis, when she finally makes up with her mind (a pistol is a handy weapon), Ozon cunningly turns the switch with a body-horror flourish, and takes giant leap in the realm of imagination to make the tall-tale plausibly cohere, a strategy might occasion mild exasperation for its tricksy repudiation, since a viewer has to forego a great chunk of its story to our protagonist's wayward figment, let's blame it on her job, a museum guardian, who has to sit for hours in a monotonous location, no wonder her mind wanders off like that.

A sashaying Marine Vacth seems more at ease when she is in motion than being projected in close-ups, looking coyly stuck-up, which betrays a dispassionate complexion that doesn't of service to Chloé's characterization, save for her feline facet (cats are salient players too); but Jérémie Renier conscientiously grasps the opportunity of the emblematic good/bad dichotomy with gumption and vigor, his dual shifting often outsmarts the longueur that Ozon cannot disperse us with. Both Jacqueline Bisset and Myriam Boyer impress with fine turns here, but no substantial leverage is lent to them. In the aftermath, a dead fetus is physically removed, but its lifelong imprint perseveres, the same cannot bear on Ozon's craft in this arch go-around.

For my money Francois Ozon turned out one half-decent film, 8 Women surrounded before and after by a pile of pretentious twaddle targeting the Academic-pseud axis and this is yet another destined to ricochet like a pin-ball around the Festival circuit. Stories about psycho=analysis are hardly new, even when Hitchcock had a stab with Spellbound it was old hat but it keeps cropping up in titles as diverse as, say, equs and Dressed To Kill. So, yes, there is a market for this stuff but Ozon is the wrong promoter.