Foreign Film Friday: L'amant Double review - a wild, kinky, doppelgänger nightmare
8th June 2018
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Verdict: Maybe not one for the casual cinema-goer, but a twisted treat for fans of erotic thrillers.
There’s a delicious sort of sickness laced within François Ozon’s latest film. A perverse, psychosexual drama based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel Lives of Twins, L’amant Double (or Double Lover) doesn’t so much skate around its incestuous underlinings as it does dive right into them like an excited cannonball.
Add in a concoction of countless dream sequences and some heavy-handed mirror imagery and you can imagine the taste would leave you bitter. But this is an Ozon film, and the results are devilishly enjoyable.
The plot centres around the distressed psyche of an ex-model named Chloé (Marine Vacth, the star of Ozon’s 2013 film Jeune et Jolie) who, after complaining of persistent stomach aches, is referred to a psychotherapist named Paul (a brilliant Jérémie Renier). Their relationship quickly segues from the professional to the carnal as both declare their attraction for one another, leading to former therapist and former patient quickly moving in together.
Chloé soon becomes suspicious, however, after discovering that Paul is hiding a secret from her involving his previously unknown twin brother Louis - also a psychotherapist.

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