The opening sequence of François Ozon’s deliciously adventurous take on Ruth Rendell’s short story presents a microcosm of what is to come – a series of ritualistic dressing details (the application of lipstick, the tethering of a stocking) with a blackly comic sting in the tail. We return to this sequence later as Romain Duris’s widowed David tells his only confidante Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) how the loss of his wife, whom Claire loved as much as he, proved a transformative experience.
En route, Ozon’s psychosexual comedy slips with Freudian playfulness between ripe Hollywood melodrama, uptight English intrigue, gay Gallic romance and ecstatic Almodóvarian exploration. Duris is suitably mercurial as the man whose mission to be “both father and mother” to his child taps into his dormant desire to slip into something more (un)comfortable. But it’s Demoustier who steals the show, her freckled face registering every nuance of Claire’s flickering mood as love turns to jealousy, infatuation and dawning self-revelation. Nods to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Preminger’s Laura are evident, but a scene in which Bruno Pérard’s Eva Carlton lip synchs to Nicole Croisille’s torchy Une Femme Avec Toi proves a sublimely defining moment.
