Old Yorker

  • L’amant double

    Old YorkerFilm review

    François Ozon (2017)

    When I saw Frantz in Edinburgh last year, the preceding trailers were for other foreign language films and a woman sitting a couple of seats from me suddenly leaned across.  ‘Is the main film going to be in English?’ she whispered anxiously.  When I replied no, French and German, she snorted, got up and left.  This was all the weirder because, on her way in, when I got up to let her pass, she’d not said thanks but almost trilled merci.  I wondered afterwards what she was expecting from something called Frantz and with the names of Ozon and Pierre Niney prominent on the poster.  Maybe Paula Beer’s name was falsely reassuring.  It’s to be hoped the retention of the original French title for the British release of Ozon’s new film[1] has proved warning enough for xenoglossophobes.

    Set in Paris, L’amant double has been ‘freely adapted’ (according to the credits) by Ozon from Joyce Carol Oates’s 1987 novel Lives of the Twins.  This glossy, soft-porn psychological thriller is also steeped in movie references, some of which even I get.  It’s a twisty take on the good twin-evil twin story that includes doppelgänger shades of Vertigo, persistent echoes of the paranoia-of-pregnancy strand of Rosemary’s Baby, and, at one point, an Alien­­­-ish abdominal explosion.  In the opening sequence, the ex-fashion model protagonist Chloé (Marine Vacth), at the end of a gynaecological examination relating to her persistent stomach aches, is told by her doctor that the pains are ‘mainly psychological’.  Chloé decides it’s time to consult a psychotherapist and asks her doctor to refer her to one.  The film’s decidedly hysterical flavour is in evidence from the word go.

    The therapist is Paul Mayer (Jérémie Renier) and he listens almost silently but sympathetically to his new patient.  She tells him she was a child her mother didn’t mean to have; Chloé fears she’s now herself incapable of love.  Her stomach problems soon clear up, at which point Paul decides to discontinue their sessions because he’s developed feelings for her.  The end of this phase of the relationship is the beginning of another.   Chloé and Paul move into an apartment together.  As she’s unpacking, she finds a passport that gives his surname as Delord.  She gets a job as a museum assistant (one of those who sit in the corner of a room of exhibits keeping a suspicious eye on visitors).  Travelling back from work one day, she sees a man whom she takes for Paul talking with a woman outside a building that she doesn’t know.  When Chloé asks him about these things, Paul says he adopted his mother’s maiden name for professional purposes; as for Chloé’s sighting of him in the street,  he insists it wasn’t him, that he ‘must have a double’.

    He’s right:  when Chloé returns to the building where she thought she saw her partner, she discovers that it houses the practice of another psychoanalyst, Louis Delord.  She makes her way to his consulting rooms – up the same winding staircase she ascended on her first visit to Paul.  Louis (also Renier) explains to her that he’s Paul’s identical twin while Paul denies Louis’s existence.  Telling Paul she’s now seeing a female analyst, Chloé becomes Louis’s patient.  His unconventional technique involves assaulting her verbally and sexually.  She’s initially hostile but soon irresistibly attracted:  she finds sex with Paul after sex with Louis relatively unexciting – except in her kinky fantasies.  These include, courtesy of CGI, having sex with Paul and Louis at the same time, with interruptions, as the twins make love to each other.

    Whether the gay element of this fantasy is Chloé’s or the writer-director’s is arguable.  (It echoes, with the added incest kick, imaginings of the heroine in Ozon’s The New Girlfriend, albeit the latter were born of anxiety.)  Some of the critics who dislike L’amant double have been more exercised, though, by what they see as the film’s persistent misogynist strain.  It’s true that Chloé isn’t likeable and her increasing infatuation with Louis could be interpreted, if you were so inclined, as an endorsement of rape culture but François Ozon’s incorrigible superficiality prevented my receiving his latest film as solemnly as this.  Shallowness was just about the only unifying factor of the first three Ozon movies I saw:  the terminal-illness character study Time to Leave (2005), the self-satisfied comedy Potiche (2010) and the gender-bending dramedy The New Girlfriend (2014).   Frantz (2016) was an improvement on these three but limited by Ozon’s style-over-substance approach.  Here, he sustains a de luxe, over-the-top quality that renders L’amant double harmless and moderately enjoyable.

    On a couple of occasions, Ozon cuts from something that the viewer takes to be really happening to reveal it as a dream (or what appears to be a dream).  This nicely anticipates, as does the doctor’s opening diagnosis of a largely psychosomatic complaint, the solution to the mystery story, most of which has taken place in Chloé’s mind.  That serpentine stairway to the twins’ consulting rooms wasn’t for nothing; nor was the film’s striking prologue, in which Chloé is in the hairdresser’s rather than the psychiatrist’s chair.  At first, a curtain of hair obscures her features; when the scissors have done their work (so that she’s a brunette version of Mia Farrow’s Rosemary), she stares wild-eyed into the camera.  Louis is a figment of her troubled imagination – an increasingly oppressive one during her pregnancy, as she fears that he, rather than Paul, is the father of the child she’s carrying.   A feline subplot that involves a spooky neighbour in the apartment building (Myriam Boyer) turns out to be not a matter of cats at all but a load of red herring.  The twin problem, however, is real (or appears to be real):  as an ‘unwanted’ foetus, Chloé absorbed the foetus of a twin sister, who remains ‘unborn’ until the Alien moment.

    This denouement is also likely to exasperate anyone taking L’amant double seriously but it has the effect of making sense of things that had seemed unconvincing as the plot thickened.  (For example:  once Louis has tricked Chloé into thinking he’s Paul, why isn’t she more worried he might have done this before or might do it again?)  It also – partly because this is such a feebly familiar way out of a story – kills your curiosity about what was and what wasn’t real in what went before.  It vindicates your sense that you’ve been watching a thoroughly evanescent entertainment.  Marine Vacth is very beautiful but her limited range makes it as well that she’s not playing the adult twins.  Jérémie Renier’s appearance as Paul vs Louis is differentiated simply, by hairstyle (over his forehead vs brushed back from it) and clothes (floppy casual vs sharp statement).  Renier gives a performance of greater skill and subtlety than those externals suggest.  The initially clear distinction between the shy, quiet Paul and the arrogant, imposing Louis becomes more intermittent, as the expressions and movements of the pair blend and separate.  Jacqueline Bisset is good in her brief appearance as Chloé’s mother/A N Other.

    6 June 2018

    [1] It’s been released as Double Lover in the US.

  • International Velvet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bryan Forbes (1978)

    Bryan Forbes, erstwhile saviour of the British film industry and, in the sixties and early seventies, the director of ‘sensitive’ treatments of ‘difficult’ subjects like The L-Shaped Room and The Raging Moon (the former is actually good enough not to deserve those inverted commas), is now making family entertainment with a vengeance.   This well-meaning reactionary lacks the common touch needed to bring it off wholeheartedly.  Last time (1976), it was The Slipper and the Rose, the story of Cinderella transposed from a frankly magical realm to the world of big-screen romantic musical.  That film was careful and a bit dreary, missing out on the grotesquerie of English pantomime, let alone Grimm fairytales.  For example, Forbes’s ‘ugly’ sisters were merely less pretty and vivacious than the heroine.  This time, it’s International Velvet, a tenuous sequel to the 1944 hit National Velvet in which a teenage Elizabeth Taylor rode The Pie to victory in the Grand National.

    The Elizabeth Taylor character, Velvet Brown, now middle-aged (and played by Nanette Newman), sees the metamorphosis of her orphaned, raised-in-America niece, Sarah (Tatum O’Neal), from upsettingly sullen mixed-up kid to Olympic gold medallist in equestrian three-day event.  The Pie, a gelding when he won the National, has turned into a stallion of exceptional longevity:  it’s his last foal, named Arizona Pie in honour of Sarah’s home state, who will carry her to Olympic glory.  Watching Sarah’s progress, Velvet is able to review her own past and binge on food for thought about the course her life has taken since her Grand National triumph.  This gives International Velvet an ambivalent framework and although the story proceeds with relentless predictability, Forbes tends to make plot twists double-edged.  Intelligence is the root cause of the film’s worst flaws:  Bryan Forbes is learning that it’s difficult, if you’re as clever as he is, to aim low and keep things simple.

    A childless, animal-loving heroine has featured before in family films but not as consciously as here.  (In Born Free, Virginia McKenna overdoes to embarrassing effect the mother love she feels for Elsa the lioness and her cubs.)  Velvet explains to Sarah that she gave up riding because she lost her nerve.  John (Christopher Plummer), the writer with whom Velvet now lives (a typically Forbesian attempt to locate his implausible story in the ‘real’, modern world), reveals this is a ‘white lie’:   Velvet, who was married at the time, fell from The Pie, lost the baby she was expecting and couldn’t have children subsequently.  So Velvet remains devoted to The Pie because she needs something to care for and, when Sarah comes along, gradually switches her maternal instincts to the teenage girl.  After her Olympic triumph for Britain, Sarah somewhat peremptorily telegraphs Velvet and John to announce that she’s marrying the vacuously handsome captain of the American three-day event team (Jeffrey Byron) and won’t be returning to England.  It’s a false alarm to the extent that the happy couple do come back for a visit to Velvet and John but the suspicion persists that Velvet is once more reduced to ‘drifting’ (her word).  The film leaves you wondering what happened to all the double-barrelled misses of the show-jumping ring when they retired from competition.  Are they, like Velvet, stuck in a horsey, adolescent time warp?

    John refuses to marry because he is scared of ‘commitment’, of ‘anything signed and sealed’.  Bryan Forbes is cultivating a wrong-headed bloom:  interestingly (or that’s the idea) flawed characters, the kind of people in whom he’s always tended to be interested, sprout from the soil of storybook fantasy.   Forbes’s other fault as a gardener is to lay things on with a trowel.   In a scene reminiscent of Harriet Smith being pursued by ruffians in Emma but without Jane Austen’s voice to interpret proceedings, Sarah and her horse are chased across a field by a car containing beer-swilling yobs with a bag of chips on their shoulder.  Attempting to escape by jumping a stile, Sarah falls and is concussed.  At this point, most of the audience I watched the film with gasped in alarm; when the yobs’ car crashed and burst into flames, they went silent.  Did their terrible end serve those nasty boys right?  Did it serve to remind Sarah of the death of her parents in a car crash that has brought her into Velvet’s care?

    On Sarah’s first trip abroad with a British equestrian team, one of the horses goes berserk in the middle of a rough transatlantic flight and has to be destroyed.  Sarah is the team reserve; you assume the distressing incident is designed as an understudy-getting-her-big-break number, familiar from backstage musicals.  All that happens is that the dead horse’s rider uses Sarah’s mount as a substitute (which wouldn’t happen in the real world).  The whole unpleasant episode serves very little purpose.

    The world of International Velvet is one in which an Olympic equestrienne’s training is financed by kindly Uncle John knocking off a best-seller in double quick time.  Bryan Forbes seems to think that the fact that this supposedly gifted writer resorts to the soft-porn market transcends the cliché; in fact, it does no more than sour it.  The film is more problematic when Forbes applies his better qualities as a writer-director to the material and achieves an effect he then tries to stifle.  He illustrates Sarah’s alienated feelings in a strange country with a shot of Velvet fussing her dog with Sarah a lonely onlooker, through the ominous din of her schoolfellows’ cruel playground laughter and the clang of the school bell.  Velvet observes in voiceover that, ironically, Sarah is alive only because her parents cared too little for her to take her with them on their last, fatal journey.  These astringent details aren’t easy to forget but Forbes pours on Francis Lai’s savagely unvarying score as if to take our minds off them.

    What saves International Velvet and ensures an effective climax is the sporting context.  Pre-Games politicking and scandals during Olympic fortnight may have become de rigueur but the founding principles of Pierre de Coubertin (quoted here by Anthony Hopkins, as the British chef d’équipe), the still largely unchallenged status of most Olympic events as a world championship and the rarity of British Olympic gold medallists combine to ensure that, for armchair viewers in this country, the Games remain the most special of sporting events.  Bryan Forbes evokes an Olympic atmosphere well enough to remind you how exciting the real thing can be.  The outcome of Sarah’s show-jumping round is a foregone conclusion but it’s still more gripping than the most expertly edited car chase.

    [1978]

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