Double Lover

DOUBLE LOVER   ***

François Ozon

2017

IDEA:  A troubled woman engages in a torrid romance with a therapist who happens to look exactly like her therapist husband.

BLURB:  An unapologetically overcooked pastiche of erotic thriller, loopy psychodrama, and Cronenberg-lite body horror, Double Lover is as intriguing as it is outlandish and unwieldy. What remains true is that Ozon knows how to establish and tease his concepts with flair; from his evocative labia-to-eye match cut to the profusion of mirrored imagery and temporal ellipses, he creates an unstable, ambiguous world of psychosexual neurosis, wherein bodily boundaries of inside and outside, self and other, fantasy and reality, become a blurred continuum. Here, the twin-double is a multivalent signifier of ego division, both a reflection and a refraction. Double Lover’s knotty logic is such that Chloé, through whose unreliable perspective the entire movie unfolds, fantasizes her own phantom twin as a more aggressive double of her male lover. Through the resulting gender-fluid triangle, she’s able to role-play as sadistic parent and masochistic child, working through both her fraught relationship with her estranged mother and the burden of her own unborn twin sister, physically and metaphorically lodged in her womb. The scenario is pure pulp psychoanalysis, its frequent risibility exacerbated by how Ozon plays it so literally in the context of Chloé’s therapy. If one can look past its heavy-handedness, as well as some of its gauche metaphysical explanations, Double Lover ends up functioning as an affecting allegory of repression, a visceral depiction of the process of identifying and expelling internalized grief. Ozon knows as well as anyone else that the cinema, the ultimate “double” in art, perfectly serves such primal drama.