User reviews

Right from the opening shot you get a pretty strong steer on what this movie is about and it will certainly appeal to the average male - and some females. It is largely pretentious soft porn but the actors do their best and it's French so appeals to me anyway.

Not a lot of plot once you're landed with the initial twist but it's passable. No more than that.

Perhaps as subtle as my titling this review 'Seeing Double', Francois Ozon's (Swimming Pool, 5x2) latest would have a billion years bad luck if every mirror in the film was shattered. With some memorable visual constructions, including an unforgettable opening match cut, 'Double Lover' is a mixed bag of slightly over egged Hitchcockian menace, queasy body horror in the vein of David Cronenberg and a cold, clinical psychological element resembling Michael Haneke. Marine Vache plays who I thought could be her character from earlier pairing with the same director, Jeune et Jolie, until the narrative progressed. Described as 'frigid' at one point, Vache's Chloe more accurately represented the temperature of the film, icy with hot spots, both sexually and visually. Concluding with a final, literal shattering shot, the highs and lows of this film are so far apart that it only just crosses the line into recommendation territory, indeed my evil twin might have placed it just below that level.

..the movie does not happen without Vacth.. ..if you do a search for photos of her.. ..you will come across dozens and dozens of images.. ..looking as if she just stepped out from a scene in this film.. ..it is her trademark 'look'..

..without a doubt a French film through and through.. ..even should you find her alluring.. ..this production will test the patience of most moviegoers..

Though I'm not a zealous fan of Francois Ozon's body of work, I must admit that I enjoyed some of his films so my expectations for "The Double Lover" were at a medium level. Unfortunately, the movie left me cold and I found the finale to be somehow frustrating in its ambiguity. Nevertheless, I liked the performances by the protagonists, especially that of Marine Vacth in the role of Chloe. Her beauty shines throughout the movie and in itself is a sufficient reason to watch it.

The story is quite simple, Chloe, a former model with a traumatic family history meets Paul (Jérémie Renier), her psychoanalyst, and falls madly in love with him after a few sessions. They move together and one day Chloe finds by mistake a passport in which Paul has a different surname. After that, a spiral of revelations will occur and Chloe will become entangled in an erotic triangle with Paul and his twin brother Louis. There is really nothing more to say about the plot which has a Hitchcockian dimension and unfolds in a slow,steady pace. The problem is that the story doesn't manage to deliver in overall terms and, as a result, "The Double Lover" seems to be a rather shallow story about an obsessed woman fighting her demons, a plot device that has become cliched in European crime film production in the last decade or so.

The erotic/sexual element, though it is strongly present at full length, doesn't manage to captivate the viewer and some scenes seem to be naive or even awkward. As I mentioned above, the finale is not at all satisfying, concluding a movie that lacks definite orientation and loses itself in the dullness of its director's indecisiveness.There are a lot of better Euro-thrillers out there, so better try your luck somewhere else.

The ever-inventive Francois Ozon tells a strange psychosexual tale in 'L'Amant Double', as a woman becomes obsessed with the idea that her lover might have an (evil) twin brother. The story soon grows barely credible, although there are definite hints that all might not actually be as it seems, and the eventual resolution is satisfactory. What I couldn't do here was really relate to any of the characters, while aspects of the movie had a purient feel (a sharp contrast to the very chaste 'Frantz', the last movie of Ozon's I watched). One wonders if the story would have worked at all with a less attractive actress in the leading role.