An uproarious erotic thriller
L’amant Double
FILM CRITIC 18 Cert, 108min Dir: François Ozon. Starring: Marine Vacth, Jérémie Renier, Jacqueline Bisset, Myriam Boyer, Dominique Redmond
The films of François Ozon exist on a heightened plane that should really be called the Ozon Layer – a realm of thin air, light heads and giddy views where the French provocateur can work his magic. His uproarious latest is an erotic thriller based on the 1987 Joyce Carol Oates novel Lives of the Twins, in which an initially sexually inhibited psychiatric patient embarks on simultaneous affairs with her therapist and his twin brother – who is also a therapist. (The film’s French title, L’amant Double, The Double Lover, is a pun on L’agent Double, The Double Agent.) Shiveringly sexy and slippery as satin, with its tongue stuck everywhere including its cheek, it’s like the wildest Frasier episode they never made, and hits all the parts, sometimes literally, the dreary Fifty Shades of Grey saga couldn’t have hoped to reach.
It starts as it means to go on, with one of the most startling opening shots in recent memory: a receding close-up of a certain female body part mid-examination, which fades to a second shot of a human eye shedding a single tear. Clearly designed by Ozon to get his audience screeching and squirming from the off, it is a thrilling and utterly surreal trash-cinema coup, as if Luis Buñuel had art-directed a centrefold in Razzle. The part under examination belongs to Chloé (Marine Vacth), an ex-model whose persistent stomach pain since puberty has baffled medics, so she enlists a therapist called Paul (Jérémie Renier) to get to its possibly psychological root.
In their first session, almost as soon as Chloé starts her breathy monologuing, Paul is clearly smitten. No wonder. Like Vacth’s teenage nymphet in Ozon’s 2013 film Jeune et Jolie, Chloé is a stock fantasy “type” – the frigid gamine, clad in androgynous jumpers and with her Erotic: Marine Vacth and Jérémie Renier in Ozon’s L’amant Double hair in a boyish crop, who just needs the right man to unlock her womanhood. Although this being Ozon, it isn’t long before this vanilla cliché becomes kinkily contorted.
One day, Chloé thinks she sees Paul emerging from a different psychiatric practice on the other side of town, but it is in fact his estranged twin brother Louis, who is also played by Renier, differently dressed and coiffed, and with a nasty streak. Seized by curiosity, Chloé books in for a session to experience Louis’s more hands-on approach: as it turns out, his hands are only the start of it. His “applied techniques” might be unorthodox, but they are also undeniably effective, and poor old Paul, who has long since transitioned from medical caregiver to live-in boyfriend, can hardly compete. During one orgasmic gasp, Ozon’s camera slips between Chloe’s parted lips like an endoscope, before rushing down her throat to reveal her vocal cords fluttering their approval.
Both Paul and Louis are harbouring secrets that bring extra elements of jeopardy to this already-risky arrangement – and as Chloé pries into their pasts, trying to fathom the exact nature of their fraternal bond, she realises her own life may be at risk. Meanwhile, she herself seems at risk of becoming cloven in two by her own double life: Ozon stuffs his sets with more mirrors than a fun house, and uses them to make Vacth splinter into fragments or divide into clones. During the therapy scenes, reflections and split screens make the consultations look whisperingly intimate, shortening the space between the characters until they’re close enough to kiss.
Ozon’s Alfred Hitchcock influences have never been hard to spot: his previous film, Frantz, was an elegant, black-and-white rethinking of Vertigo in post-war Europe. But here he tears off his shirt and goes full Brian De Palma, with sinuous tracking shots, shattering glass and mad narrative gambits in which the lines between reality and illusion are deviously blurred. During one showpiece group sex scene, Chloé unfolds down the middle like a Rorschach print, all the better to simultaneously satisfy her partners. The whole thing is as sticky and pulpy and lurid as a bowl of strawberries left out in the sun, which is absolutely the idea. Even by Ozon’s standards, it is a delicious double whammy of provocation and pleasure.