CineTrek #3 - Double Lover
Expectations were high as we headed out from Queensgate around the corner to Cine Lumiere to watch yet another foreign film, this time titled "Double Lover". Directed by Francois Ovon, "Double Lover" was a stunning romantic thriller about a young woman's emotional physical and mental journey discovering a shocking mutation within herself. To make a long and incredibly complex story short the young woman named Chloe, played by Marine Vatch, discovers that before she was born she had absorbed her twin sister within her own body. With signs of stomach pains in her early adult life and a more dramatic emotional downfall she eventually gets surgery where the discovery is made and the audience is up to question what was real and what was not. Although the mutation within Chloe is the ending of this thriller, the story is mainly surrounded around her relationship with a therapist by the name of Paul Meyer, played by Jereimie Reiner. Paul and Chloe move into together early on in the film without much of a relationship development and Chloe's stomach pains seem to be magically gone along with her loneliness. Soon after moving in with Paul, Chloe starts to have suspicions of Paul's past after finding a passport which presents the last name "Delord". Paul claims it is because he wished to take his mother's maiden name for his profession but the audience soon finds out that Paul has a twin brother named Louis Delord who is also a therapist. Although (spoiler alert) the audience after the film is over is not sure whether or not Paul or Louis really are twins or just a mirror horror image of Chloe's emotional detachment to her unborn sister who is inside of her... confused yet? The complexity of this film is what makes it so successful and that each person can have their own interpretation of what exactly happens throughout the film. The choices made by director, Francois Ovon, were so carefully woven to make a puzzling, shocking, provoking story that keeps the mind moving days after being viewed. Despite the horror, the crazy twin sex, the shocking gore of it all the most intriguing part of the film for me was the choice of how Ovon developed Chloe’s relationship with each brother. One complaint I heard from my other colleagues was that the relationship between Chloe and Paul happened too quick and there was no story, they just met and all the sudden lived together. To myself, this was a critical choice made by the director that helped make the story so rich in development. Instead of showing the audience all of Paul’s traits, he started out dry and quiet and developed into this hero-like figure that is taking care of and loving Chloe through her rather stressful development. Paul developed with Chloe and this showed their relationship was built on security, the sense that Chloe had security when she was with Paul. On the other end of the spectrum, the relationship between Chloe and Louis developed much quicker sexually and emotionally. Louis represents the guilt, pain and confusion Chloe was feeling.
As if this richly complex story was not enough, the director himself was there after the film ended to answer questions and take comments. This is what really sent me over the edge with the film because I had so many questions and being able to get some of them answered by the director himself was a treat in itself!
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