Review: L'amant double

L'amant double, the latest film from François Ozon, opens with a close-up of a woman's vagina as it is spread open by a speculum and then cuts to a close-up of that same woman's eye as a single tear falls. Audacious? Yes. Ludicrous. Highly so. It only gets crazier and kinkier from there.

Loosely based on the 1987 novel Lives of Twins, written by Joyce Carol Oates under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith, this lovingly trashy Hitchcock meets DePalma meets Cronenberg meets Verhoeven psychosexual drama centers on Chloe (Marine Vacth). She is a sullenly beautiful ex-model, living alone but for her cat Milo, currently unemployed, and is suffering from abdominal pains. Believing the pain to be psychosomatic, her gynecologist refers her to Dr. Paul Meyer (Jérémie Renier), an attractive and comforting presence with whom she shares an immediate attraction. Before one can say transference, the two are living together, she starts working at the Palais de Tokyo, and the stomach pains have subsided.

Trouble in her newfound paradise begins when she notices that he bears a different surname on his passport photo; he explains that he took his mother's maiden name though that does little to quell her rising anxiety that, whilst he knows everything about her, she knows precious little about him. She's further agitated when, on the bus one day, she spots him talking to a woman in front of a building, something which he denies when she asks him about his day later that night. Taking matters into her own hands, she returns to the building and discovers that Paul has a twin brother, Louis Delord (also played by Renier). Though Paul and Louis share identical looks and professions, the two are vastly different in natures and methods. Where Paul dresses in sweaters and listens diligently, Louis is attired in sharp suits and is arrogant, brusque, and has sex with his patients as a means of unlocking their inner problems.

"When I'm with him I want to be with you, and when I'm with you I want to be with him," Chloe tells Louis as she falls deeper into their affair. Louis' introduction turns the kink factor up to the maximum. Never mind the scene where Chloe pegs Paul, or the one where Louis goes down on a menstruating Chloe, or the rough and questionably consensual sex between Louis and Chloe, the pièce de résistance is most definitely the sequence in which Chloe imagines Louis coming into her bedroom at night as she and Paul are making love. The two brothers begin kissing each other, then Chloe, whose state of desire is so heightened that she herself splits in two.

L'amant double is a far cry from the delicate sensibilities of Ozon's previous effort, Frantz, but it is a return to the more outré vibes of his earlier works. The psychology is fairly dime-store and the motif of mirrorings/doublings glaringly obvious, but the campy tawdriness in which the drama is executed and the underlying feeling that part or possibly all of the events are strictly in Chloe's head keeps the whole enterprise both compelling and gratifying. Weird, wild and utterly cheeky, L'amant double is a kaleidoscopic funhouse that continues Ozon's themes of the inner lives of women, how imagination shapes reality, and how those closest to us will always be little more than strangers.

L'amant double

Directed by: François Ozon

Written by: François Ozon; based on the novel Lives of Twins by Joyce Carol Oates (writing as Rosamund Smith)

Starring: Marine Vacth, Jérémie Renier, Jacqueline Bisset, Myriam Boyer