X
- 2018
- Not Rated
- Cohen Media Group
- 1 h 47 m
- 2018
- Not Rated
- Cohen Media Group
- 1 h 47 m
Summary Chloé (Marine Vacth), who works as a guard at a museum in Paris, seeks to shore up her resiliency and enters psychoanalysis. In Paul Meyer (Jérémie Renier), the sensitive patient finds a caring psychiatrist who helps her overcome bouts with depression. Following the end of the treatment, both realize that they have fallen in love. A new ...
Directed By: François Ozon
Written By: Joyce Carol Oates, Philippe Piazzo, François Ozon
- 2018
- Not Rated
- Cohen Media Group
- 1 h 47 m
- 2018
- Not Rated
- Cohen Media Group
- 1 h 47 m
Double Lover
70
6.0
Where to Watch
Summary Chloé (Marine Vacth), who works as a guard at a museum in Paris, seeks to shore up her resiliency and enters psychoanalysis. In Paul Meyer (Jérémie Renier), the sensitive patient finds a caring psychiatrist who helps her overcome bouts with depression. Following the end of the treatment, both realize that they have fallen in love. A new ...
Directed By: François Ozon
Written By: Joyce Carol Oates, Philippe Piazzo, François Ozon
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 20 Critic Reviews
70
75% Positive
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
20% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
5% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 20 Critic Reviews
70
75% Positive
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
20% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
5% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Double Lover, which Mr. Ozon “freely adapted” from the Joyce Carol Oates book “Lives of the Twins,” spins its influences into a frenzy that ultimately reveals the story to be very much its own thing. And a crazy, and eventually strangely moving, thing it is. As elaborate as its visuals are, the movie is also intimate.
What gives the film its surprising coherence is not only the fluidity of Ozon's technique but also his mastery of tone, the ease with which he applies serious craft to a resolutely un-serious endeavor. The filmmaker's cackle is always audible beneath the story's glassy, deadpan surface.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 22 User Ratings
6.0
41% Positive
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
45% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
14% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 22 User Ratings
6.0
41% Positive
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
45% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
14% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
Double Lover is a beautifully acted and directed tale of twin brothers, who are psychoanalysts, and a female patient. I have seen almost all of Ozon’s films, and I found this film especially intriguing because of its connection to an early Joyce Carol Oates novel “Lives of the Twins” from which it was “loosely adapted” according to the film’s credits. As Publishers Weekly said when reviewing the novel, “[Oates] writes this as deftly and disturbingly as any of her novels, but with perhaps a lighter, more whimsical touch.” This quote describes Double Lover and Ozon’s style in this film perfectly.
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Sure, it’s kinky, but Ozon is having fun with it, to the extent that the entire film rewards that fetish all moviegoers have in common — voyeurism — offering up a kind of equal-opportunity objectification.
It’s difficult to know just how serious this is all meant to be. Then again, camp only really works when the level of intention is difficult to decipher.
Its tale of doubles, deception and desire allows Ozon to fool around with some of his favorite themes — the turbulent inner lives of complex women, the distance between appearance and reality, the essential unknowability of even our most intimate loved ones, the necessity of imagination in enduring everyday life.
A fitfully amusing erotic thriller in which nothing is what it seems, anything could happen, and everything is at least a little ridiculous.
While Double Lover is as squeamish as most Cinemax-style wank material about a certain male organ, it’s more than charitable about its female counterpart. One can’t be faulted for expecting greatness from a film that opens with a close-up of a stretched out vagina morphing into an eye.
Not nearly as smart as it thinks it is
From prolific French auteur François Ozon, L'amant double [Double Lover] is partly a study of sexual obsession, partly an oneiric mystery (think Neil Jordan's In Dreams), and partly a conventional thriller (more whoisit than whodunnit). "Freely adapted" from Joyce Carol Oates's 1987 novel Lives of the Twins (published under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith), and written by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, the film tells the story of Chloé (Marine Vacth), a woman with a fragile mental state, who falls passionately in love with her psychoanalyst, Paul (Jérémie Renier). Within a few months, she has moved in, however, as time goes by, she slowly starts to learn of a significant part of his identity which he has been concealing.
Imagine, if you will, Vertigo (1958) remade by someone like Gaspar Noé or Lars von Trier, and you'd be some way towards getting a handle on Ozon's latest; completely barmy (you know you're in strange territory when the second shot of a movie is, quite literally, an internal shot of a ****). As one would expect from Ozon, the aesthetics are solid - the film is built upon an inventive visual style employing juxtaposition, pseudo-split screen, and copious amounts of shots with one person in the frame proper, and the person to whom they're talking only visible in reflection. The sound effects are also excellent and really jolt you out of your seat on a couple of occasions. Similarly, the acting is strong, with both Vacth and Renier unrecognisable in their respective roles.
However, the melodramatic and self-congratulatory plot is an absolute mess. Many of Ozon's standard tropes are here; a dissection of the academic middle class/intelligentsia, an examination of the schism between appearance and reality, an attempt to elucidate the mind of a complex woman, a psychoanalytical bedrock, the mutability of identity etc. But it's all diffused through an utterly farcical narrative, which fails to get even the basics right. For example, sex is a central theme, but by the time we get to the fourth or fifth sex scene, it has completely lost its potency (compare, for example, the infinitely superior La vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 (2013), where sexuality is just as central, but which features only two sex scenes). The same goes for the increasingly ridiculous plot twists, once you get to three or four and you're still in the first half of the movie, you just stop caring. Ozon has always been hit and miss, for every Sitcom (1998) and Swimming Pool (2003), there's an Angel (2007) and a Ricky (2009), and L'amant double is, in the end, a rather pointless film that seems to think it's saying something exceptionally profound about desire and identity. It isn't.
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Yet another shoddy French movie with perverse sex scenes strung together in the hope the audience won’t notice the lack of writing or so-called story. If the easily (or perversely) pleased can find anything to like or respect about this low trash, then they can also be regarded as in the same class as this French dud. Another for SBS’ growing stockpile of smutty foreign movies to add to their junk heap - that only they could justify putting to air.
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Production Company
Mandarin Films,
FOZ,
Mars Films,
Playtime,
France 2 Cinéma,
Scope Pictures,
Canal+,
Ciné+,
France Télévisions,
A Plus Image 7
Release Date Feb 14, 2018
Duration 1 h 47 m
Rating Not Rated
Tagline Deception is Part of the Attraction
Awards
Golden Trailer Awards
• 1 Win & 2 Nominations
Cannes Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
Jerusalem Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
