Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: François Ozon
Starring: Marine Vacth, Jérémie Renier, Jacqueline
Bisset, Myriam Boyer, Dominque
Reymond
Most great filmmakers will at some point make a movie that explores the question of identity and its malleable nature, how we see in others what we want to see, and if we can't, how we attempt to mould them into a more satisfying embodiment of our desires. Hitchcock did it with Vertigo, De Palma with Body Double, Kieslowski with The Double Life of Véronique, and the list goes on. Some movies have preyed on the paranoia that a loved one may not be the person you believe they are, or have been somehow replaced by a malevolent force - the many Body Snatchers variations, or Villeneuve's Enemy. Others have given us duos who seem to blend into one another, their identities overlapping - Bergman's Persona, Lynch's Mulholland Dr., Altman's 3 Women.
L'Amant Double, from prolific French filmmaker François Ozon, takes a little from all three categories, delivering a movie about sinister doubles whose personas appear to overlap while the protagonist herself begins to question her own identity. He remains encamped in the territory he mined with Frantz, in which a war widow falls for a man who claims to have been friends with her late husband, only to then question the truth of his tale. That movie was a loose remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 melodrama Broken Lullaby. L'Amant Double is an equally slack take on a previous text, author Joyce Carol Oates' 1987 novel 'Lives of the Twins', previously filmed as Lies of the Twins by director Tim Hunter in 1991. You might say Ozon's recent films are themselves doubles, moulded by their creator into an image that better satisfies his taste.
Chloé is sent to visit handsome but dull therapist Paul (Jérémie Renier), and his aid seems to be helping Chloé until he cancels her sessions, admitting that he has fallen in love with his patient. The feeling is mutual, and the pair move into an apartment together. Finding Paul's passport while unpacking, Chloé is surprised to find it lists him under a different surname to the one he's practicing under. When questioned, the defensive Paul fobs her off with a story about wishing to disassociate himself from his criminal father.
One day while riding the bus, Chloé spots Paul speaking with a woman outside a building, miles away from his own practice. When Paul denies it was him, Chloé returns to the location and discovers it houses the practice of Louis, an exact physical double of Paul who shares the surname of his passport. Not initially revealing her connection between the two men, Chloé becomes a patient of Louis, who like his twin, is attracted to the pretty ex-model. Unlike nice guy Paul however, Louis has no qualms about mixing business with pleasure, seducing the confused Chloé and engaging her in aggressive sex in his office.
As we've come to expect from Ozon, his latest thriller is visually striking, and not since Mary Harron's American Psycho have sterile office environments looked so dazzling and thematically felicitous. Chloé takes a job in an art gallery, which allows Ozon free reign to fill his frame with works of art that externally hint at his protagonist's inner turmoil, a giant mess of roots hanging from the ceiling reflecting the throbbing nerves we glimpsed when his camera delved inside her body in the film's explicit opening. Chloé is frequently framed beside mirrors, a thematically on-the-nose if aesthetically arresting affectation.
For all its intrigue and Gallic gloss, L'Amant Double hits a wall in its final act, Ozon wrapping up proceedings in a manner that most viewers will find insulting. The film ends in a fashion that made me wonder if my screener was missing 15 minutes of its running time, as though Ozon grew bored with his script and wanted to move on to next year's obligatory offering. The trite explanation that resolves the drama is somewhere between the simplification of Norman Bates' psychosis that closes Psycho and a lazy schoolboy's "it was all a dream" ending for an essay he didn't want to write in the first place. Receiving a new film every year from a filmmaker as talented as Ozon may seem like a gift horse whose maw we shouldn't gaze into, but L'Amant Double is one project that could have benefitted from more time on the drawing board.
L'Amant Double is on MUBI UK
now.