Troubled ex-model Chloé (Marine Vacth), now an art gallery attendant, finally attempts to find answers for her physical and mental ailments via psychotherapist Paul (Jérémie Renier). After their professional relationship segues into a carnal one, she then also gets kinky with Paul’s identical twin brother (Renier), precipitating a messy affair of the heart and mind.
★★
L’Amant Double begins with an extreme gynaecological close-up, a vagina which then dissolves into an eye, instantly setting the tone: this erotic thriller doesn’t stop attempting to provoke and titillate until it squelches to black.
Inspired by Joyce Carol Oates’ 1987 novel Lives Of The Twins, this stars Marine Vacth as Chloé, a young model who has long suffered from phantom stomach pains, feels incapable of loving and cries for no reason. She visits a kindly therapist, Paul Meyer (Renier), to get to the bottom of things, and is soon getting to his bottom — immediately enjoying lusty fantasies about him, she only goes and tells him about it and, as he can’t help himself falling for her either, he cancels her as a client to embark on a frankly foolhardy relationship with her.
It’s well-trod territory, and too silly to get your brain sizzling.
François Ozon dials up some suspense when Chloé seemingly spots Paul in another part of town — it turns out to be his twin brother Louis, also a therapist, but brasher, aggressive and domineering. And so begins a mystery involving many skeletons in many closets. There are some enticing early scenes as the film presents itself as a sort of Hitchcockian-Freudian mind-meld, but it soon retreats into pulpy psychosexual piffle, with delusion, fantasy and history bashing heads. There’s always meaty material to be mined from this sort of doppelgänger/twin terrain, and Ozon doesn’t hold back with the mental torture, surrealist dreamscapes and psychological masochism. But it’s well-trod territory, and too silly here to get your brain properly sizzling.
Ozon (Swimming Pool, Jeune Et Jolie) loves his lusty dramas — a bit of pervy tension, lovingly shot. The sex here, though, feels like 1990’s softcore cable erotica, lacking in feels and thrills, much like the film as a whole — this is pretty corny stuff, knowingly trashy but masquerading as something headier.
Saucy and silly, L’Amant Double is a disappointingly superficial romp, with interesting psychological potential squandered by B-movie levels of nonsense. Identity crises all round.