L'Amant double (2017)
Directed by François Ozon

Film Review

Diversity being the defining feature of François Ozon's cinema, it hardly comes as a surprise that the director should follow his widely acclaimed lowkey period melodrama Frantz (2016) with a full-on digression into far more overtly populist fare.  With L'Amant double (taken from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates), Ozon gleefully reverts to his 'bad boy' reputation with a full-on erotic thriller that borrows liberally from Fifty Shades of Grey, as if to remind the world that sexual perversion is not a uniquely American phenomenon.  The American influences do not stop there.  From Hitchcock to Brian De Palma, Ozon's latest film is packed chockful of film references, and if the plot doesn't cause you to think of David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) and Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992), you're probably not paying attention.  L'Amant double is Ozon's most blatantly derivative film to date - it positively revels in its mimicry.

Now this would be fine if the film had something to offer in addition to an over-generous offering of second-hand ideas.  The problem with Ozon's latest copycat romp into Naughtyville is that it is all pastiche - layer upon layer of it - and not a single original idea to be found anywhere, at least not one that justifes such a wholesale smash-and-grab raid of other people's work.  The genuinely unsettling aura that permeates the director's earlier and far more inventive offerings in the thriller genre - Les Amants criminels (1999) and Swimming Pool (2003) - is singularly lacking in this latest manic potpourri.  And whilst Ozon's creative flair is present, as ever, in his slick mise-en-scène, he lets himself down badly by going into a production with a script that should have gone through at least ten more re-drafts before the cameras started rolling.  A few extra cold showers may also have helped.

Painfully flawed though it is - the acting is almost as risible as the writing - L'Amant double is nonetheless quintessential Ozon, and fans of this most unpredictable of directors will no doubt welcome his return to the kitsch sordidness of his early years.  With its opening shot, which makes the unlikely transition from a woman's most intimate parts to a weeping eye, the film makes a bold statement and warns us that what we think we see may not actually be what we are seeing.  Ozon then takes this wise assertion to increasingly ludicrous extremes, the opening trompe-l'oeil motif being reflected in the plot, which builds deception upon deception until the spectator, like the unfortunate heroine, soon feels immured in a soul-crushing maze of monstrous proportions.  Your expectations that it will all come together in the final reel are dashed when this absurd hall of mirrors comes crashing down with the final flurry of plot twists, which prove to be as hard to digest as a month-old tiramisu dowsed with barbecue sauce.

Saddled with a plot that is even less credible than a political party manifesto, lead actors Jérémie Renier and Marine Vacth can be forgiven for looking like they have never appeared in front of a camera before.  Vacth, who was admirably placed in Ozon's earlier film Jeune et jolie (2013), is distinctly ill-suited to play the Hitchcockian 'woman in peril' and elicits about as much sympathy as a rabies-infected vixen in a fox hunt.  Renier's histrionic malfunction is harder to account for and even harder to forgive - given the actor's solid repertoire across a wide range of films that mostly invite respect, if not acclaim.  Suffice it to say, that the more far-fetched the plot gets, the more ludicrously unconvincing the lead actors become, and as the film ends in a whirlwind of Grand Guignol excess, that's a pretty mind-blowing level of bad acting.  For those who like their Ozon raw and unadulterated, untainted by restraint and good taste, L'Amant double is a veritable banquet.  For everyone else, it's best to give this ungainly kink-laden aberration a very wide berth.

Film Synopsis

Chloé is a woman in her mid-twenties who is coping badly with an ever-worsening bout of depression.  Medically there is nothing wrong with her, so she takes her doctor's advice and consults a psychiatrist, Paul.  The treatment works better than Chloé could have imagined and in no time she is so deeply in love with her therapist that she is soon sharing an apartment with him.  The idyllic romance is disturbed when, one day, Chloé sees from a distance a man who looks exactly like her partner but couldn't possibly be him.  It transpires that Paul has a twin brother, Louis, who is his exact opposite in temperament, although he too is a psychiatrist.  Intrigued, Chloé feels compelled to become a patient of Louis, and it isn't long before she becomes a willing participant in his wild sexual escapades.  Louis meets the young woman's physical needs as amply as Paul fulfuils her emotional requirements, but far from being satisfied Chloé becomes ever more unsettled by her fractured love life.  Then it dawns on her that she might be the victim of a cruel and vicious conspiracy...