France  –  Drama, Romance, Thriller  –  Year: 2017  –  Running time: 107 mins
Language: French

Audience Response:

Rating:  (3.0 from 19 responses)

• Excellent’: 0 votes
• ‘Very Good’: 7 votes
• ‘Good’: 8 votes
• ‘Satisfactory’: 2 votes
• ‘Poor’: 2 votes

Read the comments here or visit our “L’Amant Double” discussion page.

Synopsis:

Receiving treatment from a psychologist, Paul, for psychosomatic aches and pains, Chloé falls for him.  Living together, she discovers that Paul has an identical twin, Louis, also a therapist, the ‘double’ in the title.  An inevitable affair develops.  Dualities run  through the film, with allusions to Hitchcock – the score and a Vertigo-style spiral staircase, and a debt to Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.  A skin-tingling erotic thriller as only Ozon could construct.

Francois Ozon’s good twin/bad twin thriller puts dull Hollywood twaddle like Fifty Shades Freed to shame with its wild, wanton ride into the subconscious. Prepare for a mindblower.
Peter Travers (Rolling Stone)

Director: François Ozon
 The New Girlfriend (2014) / In The House (2012) / Swimming Pool (2003)
Cast:
Marine Vacth                                  …   Chloé
Jérémie Renier                               …   Paul / Louis
Jacqueline Bisset                           …   Mme Schenker / Chloé’s Mother
Myriam Boyer                                 …   Rose
Dominique Reymond                      …   Gynaecologist / Agnès Wexler
Fanny Sage                                    …   Sandra Schenker
(for full cast, and more information, see “L’Amant Double” in IMDB)

CFC Film Notes

Is there a director currently working who is as effortlessly versatile as François Ozon?  Or as fluent in the language of cinema?  To go from the wistful painterly restraint of the post-first-world-war drama Frantz to the pulpy perve-fest mind games of L’Amant Double, and to bring the same exquisite level of craft to both – Ozon is a director whose unabashed pleasure in his medium is infectious.  And it’s this – the juxtaposition of effortlessly rarefied film-making techniques with a deliciously schlocky premise and its collision of kink and crazy – that makes L’Amant Double such a turn-on.

The story – a disorienting deep dive into the subconscious and the sexual fantasies of a fragile young woman – wears its fetishes as boldly as any Hitchcockian corsetry.  Chloé (Ozon’s Jeune & Jolie muse Marine Vacth) visits psychologist Paul (Jérémie Renier) for treatment of psychosomatic aches. She falls in love with him, but shortly after they move in together, she discovers that he has an identical twin, Louis, also a therapist.  Tellingly, while there is a neat symmetry to Chloé’s therapy sessions with Paul, in Louis’s consulting room, they are never in focus at the same time.  Their inevitable affair – a power struggle between the sheets – allows Chloé to explore elements of her sexuality that had hitherto lain dormant.

Dualities run through the film, both thematically and visually: good and bad, sub and dom, black and white.  Ozon splits his screen using mirrors and reflections, and hides “twins” – both in the frame (pairs of orchid stems, a double lamp) and in the story (two cats have key roles).

The film, which is based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, nods to Hitchcock in everything from the score to the use of a Vertigo-style spiral staircase, which tips us off-balance.  And, in the body horror and the twin-fetish plotline, there is an obvious debt to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.  But the skin-tingling subversion of the erotic thriller premise is all Ozon.

(Wendy Ide, The Observer, June 2018)

Selected UK reviews:

Uncut (Michael Bonner)
Independent (Geoffrey Macnab)
Little White Lies (Manuela Lazic)

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