Towards the end of L'Amant double, isn't the cat seen by Chloé (Marine Vacth) just a hallucination, a trick of the mind, a dream? Didn't that cat just disappear from the flat of Rose (Myriam Boyer), but then reappear in Rose's doorway held in the arms of Paul (Jérémie Renier), like a very welcome refound present? No, that was just in one of Chloé's dreams. But then, there seem to be many dreams, many fantasies in this film where very little is quite what it seems, where the mysterious can lurk in the everyday, where everything can twist so many times.
So what is real here, how much can we grasp for certain? Chloé is psychologically disturbed and after a series of sessions with shrink Paul they fall for each other and start living together without the cat as Paul doesn't like them. Oh, and Chloé has stomach pains – doctors may think they're part of her mental sickness, but they're real all right. And the rest? Who can say?
Chloé finds that Paul has been hiding his past, has a twin brother Louis, but they have different names and Paul refuses to recognise him – as Paul is gentle and loving, Louis is mean and violent, and we discover later that in his youth Louis raped Sandra (Fanny Sage), who was a virgin, Paul's innocent girlfriend now a vegetable. But Chloé gets to meet Louis and loves his violent ways, and becomes pregnant by...which brother? But hang on, why is the mother of Sandra (Jacqueline Bisset) so angry with Chloé, and can she really read her mind?
So Chloé kills Louis, or is it Paul, or surely that's fantasy too? Then she has to be rushed to hospital and we see that Chloé's mother is also Sandra's mother: that, at least, is true in a sense as Chloé's parasitic twin which she's absorbed – all two pounds of it, so her stomach pains in the end weren't part of her illness – she chooses to call Sandra. So she wasn't pregnant after all. Doubles, mirrors, illusions, dreams. This is quite a film, one of Ozon's more complicated ones.
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