Rating: ★★ (Field magazine system, 4 stars out of 10)
Probably the main competition in the second half of Cannes has been thrown on the street, especially after being depressed by "Rodin", coupled with the lack of strength of the early "Good Time", resulting in the "Two-Faced Lover" scene and word of mouth in the media field at night. My own on-site perception is also quite good, but the more I think about it after the screening, the more I discuss it, the more problems I find. To be honest, of course, this film cannot be compared with the two highest careers of Ou Rong, "Entering the House" and "Eight Beautiful Pictures", but it is also better than such as "Ricky" and "Love Heaven". As a psychological suspense film, the layout stage weather is very good, the problem is mainly in the trick and the solution, mean to say, simply in these two places fell to the level of domestic network big...
The film tells the story of former model Chloe who goes to the treatment of the psychologist Paul because of the unexplainable stomach pain, and after the two gradually fall in love, Paul terminates the treatment and pursues Chloe; after the two live together, Chloe also finds a new job in the Museum of Contemporary Art, but paul is distressed because Paul is reluctant to talk about his past. One day Chloe meets a man on the street who resembles Paul and is also a practising psychologist; Chloe pretends to be a patient and goes to make an appointment for treatment, only to find out that he is Paul's twin brother Louis. Chloe begins to struggle between the two brothers and is extremely satisfied with sex with Louis, even becoming pregnant with Louis's child. As Louis's desire for control grows stronger and Paul proposes to her, Chloe finally digs up the brothers' past after some persecution: Louis is jealous that Paul has pretended to be him to pursue and raped her then-girlfriend Sandra. Chloe eventually can't stand the threat from Louie and arrives at Louis's clinic with a gun, only to find that Paul is there too, and Chloe, unable to tell the difference between the brothers, shoots and hits one of them, knocking herself unconscious and being taken to the hospital. Then there is the moment of witnessing the miracle: it turns out that everything is because Chloe has absorbed the embryos of the identical twin sisters, and Paul has no brothers at all, and the so-called twin brother Louis and the sexual relationship with him are all due to... Chloe's fantasies or delusions because she is a homogeneous twin...
This plot is simply ... "Reasoning" or the big level of the domestic network, and the Chinese screenwriters have come up with all kinds of twisted materialist explanations after being forced to collapse by the censorship system. First of all, the twin's Trick is very bad - of course, the inspiration for this film itself comes from an American eighteen-line thriller short story "Lives of the Twins, by joyce carol oates"- fortunately, the play is still a bit interesting, mirroring Chloe's own identical twins as her boyfriend Paul and his evil twin brother (but the twin brother terrier is simply too old-fashioned), It is also in line with the audiovisual structure and the mirror image emphasized on the setting, but the main problem is that it is answered with delusion, in fact, it cannot be justified, and the front film is too realistic (although it is full of mirrors, dreams and psychoanalysis), resulting in the back not being round at all, and even the degree of "Black Swan" is not reached, not to mention "The House of The Unma"-this is the fundamental reason why the theater thinks more and more wrong.
But regardless of the pit daddy ending, there are still many remarkable points in the front of the film. Audiovisually, I feel that this film is quite influenced by Nicholas Winding Rayfern, not only is the extremely emotionally guided and atmospheric rendering music similar to "Outlaw" and "Neon Demon", but even Chloe's exaggerated space in the Museum of Contemporary Art also has some visual similarities with "Neon Demon". This style of music and photography is not Ou Rong's usual style, but for him it is a kind of self-breakthrough.
Secondly, the film's various sex scenes are not very large in the entire so-called "French neo-extremist" film context (this genre includes Euron, Claire Denis, Catelyn Brea, Gaspar Noe, Bruno Dumont, etc.), one of the "delusional 3ps" is used in the old meme of Ou Jong's "Under the Sand", but it is worth mentioning that because of Euron's own queer identity, there are some passages in the bed scene that are used to express "the diversity of sexual behavior" and "the fluidity of sexual orientation", For example, in Chloe's delusions, when the two brothers have sex with her (typically gay) kissing and touching each other, as Chloe puts on a dildo she bought from a sex toy store and treats Paul (beep--), at least at this moment Chloe is temporarily transgender male. At least five thousand words can be discussed here, because the main plot of the whole film is Chloe's rich and diverse sexual fantasies...
The third is the use of mirror images in the film, several of which even use multiple mirrors (especially the foyer and interior decoration of Louis's clinic); and the mirror images on the set also correspond to various mirror relationships in the play, such as the process and dialogue between Chloe and Paul and Louis during the first treatment, and Paul's ex-girlfriend Sandra in Chloe's delusion, which is actually a mirror image projection of the embryo of her twin sister who has existed in her body for more than twenty years, causing her stomach pain.
There are some more interesting points that can be done here, but the problem with Euron's values is that... Directly let "Sandra's mother" (is she there?). Or is it delusional? But it should be delusional... Scolding Chloe for wanting to have a double sexual relationship with the twins (the original word is little hahaha), and having Louis (delusional) point out that both Sandra and Chloe actually enjoy and are responsible for this dual sex – if the explanation at the end of the film holds true, these are all guilt and self-torture from Chloe's delusions, excluding the pathological causes (homogeneous twin terriers), at least in terms of values, This attitude of even sexual fantasies is obviously a very conservative and Taoist expression of women's body and sex, "You are not right to think so." The question is, isn't it self-contradictory to film so many seemingly large-scale sex scenes and end up pathologizing it with a conservative moral preaching?
Fortunately, the male and female protagonists of the film also performed well. Marion Vackert, who starred in "Flowers and Moons", has a short hair style in this film that has the flavor of Juliet Binoche in her youth; while the male protagonist Jeremy Renier is from the teenager in the Dane brothers' "A Promise" to the uncle in this film, and his acting skills are becoming more and more exquisite, and it is extremely challenging to play two roles by one person, and the scale of this play is not small. Ou Rong did suddenly release himself this time, but in fact... I think of several of his highly subjective works, such as the wife's inability to let go of her missing husband in "Under the Sand", the creation of the novelist in "Murder in the Pool", and even "Entering the House" itself, which discusses the meta-narrative problem, which is actually handled very cleverly and is quite wonderful when recalled. "Two-Faced Lover" is really out of the theater to wake up bored and seem to have too many slots.
This is only a discussion of the play and values, and has not yet begun to explore the (usually excessive) social orientation of sexuality and violence in the "French Neo-Extremism"—yes, this film does not point to anything, it is a closed "sex thriller" (the term used in the Guardian film review, sexual thriller). Although it is really possible to do ideological analysis on the line (of course, you can easily get the meme of The East and West Ou in "Veronica's Double Life", not to mention that one swallowed and absorbed the other, and now there are adverse reactions; don't forget that the heroine is born in 91... But just as Ou Rong wished, let's suspend it.
|The opinion of the author is expressed only :=)
Ph.D. in Film Studies, Part-time Curator, Amateur Film Critic, Fan Director, Professional Film Researcher.