The softcore silliness and lite-erotic stylings of François Ozon’s horribly middleweight psycho-suspense thriller may yet give it camp classic status, like a super-porny version of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected.
There’s admittedly a cheeky wit to the opening visual gag, which converts a gynaecological image into a crying eye. And it has what future cultural historians may come to think of as the best female strap-on scene since Myra Breckinridge. Who knows?
But basically, it looks a 105-minute ad for perfume: Pervitude, by Chanel. It’s a wildly dated-looking and derivative film, a quaint adventure in fantasised naughtiness, like Ozon’s teen prostitute fantasy Jeune et Jolie in 2013, which starred his lead actress here, Marine Vacth, in a similarly gamine role.
L’Amant Double – The Double Lover – is avowedly inspired by a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, called Lives of the Twins. Actually it looks a bit like a mock-sophisticated version of a Claude Chabrol movie based on Ruth Rendell.
It also softens and dilutes darker ideas found in Cronenberg or Polanski: the “twin” theme is borrowed from Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and all too often, Vacth – who is shown in an early scene getting her hair cut – seems to be modelling herself on Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby. The difference is that Mia Farrow was really good at acting. Vacth seems to be shaping up as the arthouse-erotica answer to the George Lazenby 007. And this film is topped off with a hugely annoying and pointless trick ending that has been with cinema since its earliest days.
Vacth plays Chloé, a beautiful, vulnerable, doe-eyed young woman, disillusioned with the modelling world in which she once earned a crust, who now works as an attendant in a super-trendy art gallery, sitting there in that white-walled environment like one of the enigmatic exhibits.
She is suffering from stomach pains and having been advised that these are psychosomatic, she visits a shrink: the handsomely bespectacled Paul Meyer, played by Jérémie Renier. The instant spark between them is undeniable. There’s a whole lot of transference going on. But it’s more than that. They fall in love, move in together, and Paul delicately suggests she continue her therapy with someone else.
But Chloé is to discover a strange secret: he has a twin brother, Louis (also played by Renier) who also happens to be a therapist. She winds up going to him and – ooo-er! – Louis believes in freeing up his patients’ emotional states by having vigorous sex with them in the therapy room, and he’s also not averse to launching into a little bit of role-play rough stuff without first sitting down to discuss the safe word. He is as raunchy and thrilling as Paul is considerate and a bit dull. Chloé is totally into it. But wait. How can she be sure which one she is with? And there is also the little matter of not having seen them in the same room together - except in her steamy reveries of three-way shagging. But this sex is unprotected. Who knows what kind of DNA-based conundrum this will lead to? It sounds to me as if poor Chloé is going to wind up needing a therapist.
Again and again, Ozon contrives cumbersome mirror scenes and reflections in dark glass, as if to say: whoa, looking at your reflection, it’s heady and narcissistic and a bit of an all-round twin-like turn-on!
The eroticism of L’Amant Double is not boring – affecting to find onscreen sex boring is a critical evasion I have complained about in the past – but almost everything else about it is. There is lots of oral sex, but Ozon seems most turned on by the idea of one’s tongue going into one’s own cheek; he seems partly to be hinting that this is all a big camp joke, and that you should be laughing at it. But also he seems to be claiming deadly serious suspense status as well, chiefly through all the ersatz stylishness. Perhaps it would look better in a double bill with that other doppelgänger masterpiece Twins, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito.
