France’s ever-reliable and prolific auteur François Ozon (“Swimming Pool”) confirms his place as an inventive filmic storyteller with a precise sense of style, suspense, emotion, and tone. 2018 has its first great film.
Based loosely on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel “Lives of Twins” (written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith), “Double Lover” is an alluring erotic mystery built on a puzzle of the flesh.
Surrealism and magical realism come into play. You could easily imagine David Cronenberg directing it but the film wouldn’t be near as good if he had.
Jérémie Renier (from Ozon’s 1999 erotic thriller “Criminal Lovers”) plays twin psychoanalyst brothers Paul Meyer and Louis Delord.
Marine Vacth, the unforgettable star of Ozon’s recent “Young & Beautiful,” plays Chloe, a 25-year-old museum guard with model looks who suffers from unexplained stomach pains. Chloe becomes Paul’s patient before the sessions turn romantic to the point that they move in together with Chloe’s expressive cat Milo. Another cat character figures into the storyline as well.
Yes, here is a movie with two feline characters played by cats. Brilliant.
Rarely, if ever, has a mainstream filmmaker made such explicit use of a woman’s vagina to such sinewy narrative effect. The film opens with a close-up view inside Chloe’s vagina from her OBGYN’s vantage point before morphing into an eye.
Hitchcock had nothing on Ozon. Later in the film we watch an interior view of Chloe’s orgasming vagina (in black-and-white) during sex with Renier’s BDSM master Louis Delord. However biologically pornographic these sequences sound, they are composed in service to the film.
This is visceral stuff. Such a high-wire act is not easily achieved. Ozon exerts exquisite control over the diabolically twisted proceedings that draw in a deft turn from Jaqueline Bisset.
To be sure, there are some BDSM sequences between Louis and Chloe that seem sexually abusive if you discount the master/slave relationship at play. Tricky. Ozon balances the scale with a scene of Chloe pegging Paul, even if Paul says he only did it for Chloe.
“Double Lover” is an ideal Valentine’s Day movie for the adventurous. It gets you in the head, heart, and loins.
Rated R. 107 mins.
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