Double Lover (L'Amant Double) (2017)

Like an add-on chapter to David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, one that no-one wanted or asked for, this François Ozon movie tells of mentally fragile Chloe's therapy sessions (read 'sex sessions') with a pair of pouty Calvin Klein-model psychotherapists - twins - and is a movie that quickly forgets that one of the twins that Chloe marries - the dowdy cardigan-wearing one - is driving her crazy with his secrets - but that must have been just to progress the story because lickety-split and before you can say, "This is not going to end sensibly," he reverts to being a model citizen, no hint of a lie, while she starts a torrid affair with the twin brother - the wild one with smart shirts unbuttoned to expose a hard, hairless chest - and from that point, things start to make less and less sense with the movie's raison d'etre simply being repetitive sex scenes including a centrepiece involving both brothers.

★★☆☆☆

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In The House (2012)

A French literature teacher enters into the thrall of a talented writer when a student starts submitting for correction excerpts of a work-in-progress, but his story is sinister, the student's motivation in telling the story is mysterious, and pretty soon author, reader, characters and story are all vying for creative control in François Ozon's initially intriguing drama that quickly becomes laboured as characters start behaving in farcical, theatrical rather than sinister Hitchcockian ways.

★★☆☆☆

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Under the Sand (Sous Le Sable) (2000)

A woman's husband vanishes without trace from an unpatrolled beach in France in François Ozon's precursor to his 2003 Swimming Pool, another movie in which he has Charlotte Rampling doing what Charlotte Rampling does (in 45 Years, in Swimming Pool...), drifting around as an emotionally, physically distant older woman who may or may not be delusional, grappling with loneliness or interacting with figaments of her imagination.

★★★★☆

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Frantz (2016)

In the aftermath of World War I, a grieving young German woman comes across a foreigner at the grave of her fiance, in this beautifully photographed, beautifully acted, beautifully scored, and beautifully unhurried story of romance and intrigue from director François Ozon.

★★★★☆

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Swimming Pool (2003)

A mystery writer on deadline retreats to her publisher's Spanish hacienda to really engross herself in writing but instead becomes engrossed in the publisher's wayward sex-kitten daughter unexpectedly there - she creates mayhem but will surely provide enough fodder to ease the writer's writer's block, in this suspense thriller full of all the right ingredients but sadly undercooked.

★★★☆☆

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