SHORT TAKES
DOUBLE LOVER
directed by François Ozon
Patchy French writer-director François Ozon loses control of promising material in this freewheeling adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ pseudonymous novel Lives of the Twins. Ozon’s preoccupation with psychosexual themes, and his characteristically arch treatment of them, looks faintly adolescent, particularly if your cinematic diet has included helpings of Hitchcock, Polanski and De Palma.
Chloé (Marine Vacth), tormented by stomach pains her gynaecologist cannot explain, consults psychiatrist Paul Meyer (Jérémie Renier), though their relationship moves beyond the professional with dizzying speed. Following up a chance sighting of a man she assumes is Paul, she finds herself in the rooms of another shrink, Louis Delord (also Renier), who claims to be Paul’s twin.
As the twisting story, full of family secrets and lies, unspools, we are meant to wonder who’s gaming who, particularly when major plot developments are hosed down after Chloé wakes from a bad dream. With a tiresomely dated use of mirrors and reflective surfaces, not to mention a profusion of imagery (the stairwells of spiral staircases are a favourite) of female genitalia, it threatens to turn into a frenzy of cod-Freudian pap.
This is all by way of softening us up for some rough sex that might have seemed sophisticated in the 60s, but is more than a little dodgy in 2018. In the last reel, David Cronenberg appears to have taken over directing duties, but I couldn’t stop wondering how a parttime art gallery attendant can afford therapy at €150 a pop.
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