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The Double Lover
**
Dir: François Ozon
Starring: Marine Vacth, Jérémie Renier
(France, 18, 1hr 47mins)
Opening with a graphic close-up shot of a gynaecology examination and proceeding to morph this image into the weeping eye of the film’s female protagonist, one wouldn’t be reproached for holding a sense of optimism about The Double Lover and it’s desire to push experimental boundaries. However, this outlandish, well-managed introduction is unmatched in its artistic ambition compared to the rest of the picture.
François Ozon’s latest outing reunites him with lead actress Marine Vacth, amidst similarly sexually-disorientating circumstances to that of their last collaboration: Ozon’s 2013 erotic drama about teenage prostitution, Jeune et Jolie. Here, Vacth plays the 25-year-old Chloe; naive, boyish and overwhelmed with insecurities that are never properly underpinned. Within her emotionally-charged defiance is meant to appear a deeper sense of goodness and purity, yet there is too much ambiguity and too little character development for Chloe to come out the other side as likeable, with a journey of bizarre sexual self-discovery appearing before her instead.
Referred to a psychiatrist due ongoing stomach pains, Chloe engages in a series of sessions to Jérémie Renier’s gracefully shy shrink, Paul. The pair rapidly form a relationship, in which Chloe is uncompromisingly suspicious and Paul’s only apparent downfall is that he isn’t a fan of cats. The relationship doesn’t cure Chloe’s stomach pains though, and after discovering that Paul has an identical twin brother – also a shrink – she visits him secretly to find out why Paul has kept him a secret. As Louis, the twin brother, tears off her clothes and they engage in raging, animalistic sex, it’s clear that his psychiatric techniques are a little less orthodox than his sibling.
Each of Chloe’s relationships, and even her minor interactions with secondary characters, are rather unreal and wooden, but not in the ethereal sense that Ozon is so keen on pushing. The dialogue is rigid, and often other characters slip in and out of the story with no story-driven agenda. Chloe’s neighbour, an old lady who has stuffed her old cat, is uncomfortably strange and there are suggestions that she is ‘in on’ whatever tribulations lie afoot. Yet once Chloe wakes to this old lady being sat at the foot of her bed, in true American-horror-style fashion, she vanishes from the plot for good.
There are some saving graces. The painfully clear irony of Chloe’s job as a ‘people watcher’ at a museum, having previously been the ‘watched’ as a model in her youth, is hardly subtle, but some of the locations are wonderful, with some visually stunning shots of Chloe sat symmetrically against the white walls of the museum amongst various pieces of art. The perversity of Chloe’s contrasting relationships with the twin brothers, too, is ambitious and shocking, but often there is a sense that everyone is just trying far too hard to be sexy.
The concept of The Double Lover may well have started out with a distinct aim in what it was trying to be. The end product, though, tells us the opposite. Does it want to be a psycho-sexual thriller? An Oedipus critique? A provocative chiller, maybe? In the end though, only Ozon can tell us what to think, because the film sure as hell doesn’t.
words Charlie Cottrell