Showing posts with label François Ozon. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

L’Amant Double review / Kinky, crazy and twice the fun

L’Amant Double review – kinky, crazy and twice the fun

4/5stars4 out of 5 stars.
François Ozon’s disorienting erotic thriller nods to Hitchcock and Cronenberg but becomes something uniquely his own

s there a director currently working who is as effortlessly versatile asFrançois Ozon? Or as fluent in the language of cinema? To go from the wistful painterly restraint of the post-first-world-war drama Frantz to the pulpy perve-fest mind games of L’Amant Double, and to bring the same exquisite level of craft to both – Ozon is a director whose unabashed pleasure in his medium is infectious. And it’s this – the juxtaposition of effortlessly rarefied film-making techniques with a deliciously schlocky premise and its collision of kink and crazy – that makes L’Amant Double such a turn-on.

Jeune et Jolie – review

2/5stars2 out of 5 stars.
A vacant central performance and equally empty directorial treatment cast no light on the difficult subject of teenage prostitution

Mark Kermode
Sunday 1 December 2013

The whiff of fatuousness pervades François Ozon's film about "what it feels like to be 17" in which the grim subject of teenage prostitution is flirted with "to illustrate the questions of identity and sexuality raised by adolescence". Blithely quoting the poems of Rimbaud and the songs of Françoise Hardy, Ozon presents a four seasons portrait of "young and beautiful" Isabelle (Marine Vacth) who drifts listlessly from losing her virginity on a beach to selling her body in hotels.

Her motives are unclear. Beyond a disenchantment with people in general and sex in particular, there's no driving force (monetary, domestic) behind her actions. Inevitably, she ends up making a "connection" with an ageing client (Johan Leysen) with whom Ozon breezily imagines that her professional transactions are "tender, not at all mechanical", the tiredest of soft-soap cliches. Vacth remains impressively vacant throughout, although the real prize in that respect must go to Ozon himself.

THE GUARDIAN