FRANCOIS OZON'S L'AMANT DOUBLE

Francois Ozon has a playful fascination with ambiguity, something film allows, if not encourages, in its story-telling. L'Amant Double (Double Lover) revels in its ambiguities, which are multi-layered and expansive: the entire story may be one thing or may be another. Or bits of each.

Chloe (Marine Vacht) is a beautiful but insecure ex-model, suffering from intense abdominal pain from no apparent source. She's retreated into a job as a museum guard, and the film opens with her hair being cut, as if to remove her female allure, and render her sexuality ambiguous. She begins seeing a psychoanalyst, Paul (Jeremie Renier). She seems to be making progress, but Paul needs to drop her as a patient because he is falling in love with her, and they begin an affair. Paul is very much in thrall to Chloe's beauty, while allowing her vulnerability space to exert her control over him. It all seems to progress, until she discovers Paul uses his mother's name, and has an identical twin brother, who is also a psychoanalyst. So she begins seeing Louis, and almost immediately is drawn into another affair, one in which she is dominated.

There is nothing particularly challenging here: in fact it's very much phallo-centric in the sense that as Louis dominates Chloe, she is freed, as it were to dominate Paul, and phallo-literally as we shall see. Renier's good at making the two brothers recognisably different; his Louis is very much hard-bodied, contrasted with Paul's crunchy preppy BCBG self, softened by jumpers and moony gazes. But simply take off Paul's smart-guy Clark Kent glasses and he turns into Louis' sexual Superman. You can't help but think Ozon is amused by all this: Paul can't stand Chloe's cat Milo ('my baby' she says—remember the stomach pains); while Louis has a very rare breed of chat—'un chat unique' he says, which if you don't know French is a pun because le chat is French for what Donald Trump grabs. These tortiose-shell felines are usually female, but males with three colours are always twins, xxy as it were. You see the point?

That's droll, but the film's funniest moment may be when Paul proposes to Chloe in a restaurant. As they walk home, she looks in a shop window—ah, the audience thinks, the ring?--and goes into a sex shop for a dildo. That night she pegs Paul, who despite his protestations of innocence, seems remarkably comfortable with the whole business. L'Amant Double didn't win any prizes at Cannes, but if the Adult Video Awards in Vegas have a best foreign strap-on gong, Vacth will be in the frame.

The most obvious antecedent for L'Amant Double is David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, with Jeremy Irons as the twin shrinks and Genevieve Bujold as the insecure patient. Ozon's nods include Cronenberg's fascination with biological function: after the opening a scene of Chloe's hair being cut we go immediately to an extreme close up of a vagina held open by a speculum. We are confronted with a mind/body dilemma, which obviously is what Chloe needs to sort out, and like Ozon's twins, we the audience will have to try to figure out what it is. You can see, especially in some of the design and use of colour, Brian de Palma's Body Double, and that same sense of the exploitation that begins with our gaze on Vacth's elusive beauty: another of Ozon's amusing scenes has Vacth, feeling liberated, walking across the museum floor with her most aggressively alluring power-swivel cat-walk walk. Remember 'le chat'?

And of course there is Hitchcock, and Vertigo. It seems to be trying hard enough that in some ways the best comparison for Ozon might be the Coen Brothers, whose work delves in genre remakes, hommages, and increasingly, commentary. This is intensified by the production design by Sylvie Olive, especially the dual sets of the twin shrink's flats. In fact another of the movie's funniest moments is realising the parallels between the consulting brothers: by now you can probably figure from the stills which is Paul and which Louis. Ozon's constant framing of double-images, mirrors, reflections in rainy windows and even characters, with Jacqueline Bissett playing both the mother of a girl with whom the twins were once involved and Chloe's own mother.

This is apparently based on a suspense novel by Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith, though very loosely indeed. But that question of genre is crucial here, even to the basic point of Oates using a second identity for her delve into thrillers. Ozon might have gone back and absorbed Truffaut's interviews with Hitchcock before making this movie, studied the approach to dealing with audience expectations in genres, and one wonders in the end if perhaps it is too knowing, too detached, or if he's simply playing with that idea. He even inserts the Chekovian pistol, as if to nod knowingly to the viewer. But even when she is the penetrator we wonder. Is Chloe their victim? Is she ours? Vacth's beauty is in a sense too perfect and cold; her vulnerability is never more convincing than her allure. Think of the detachment Vacth showed in Ozon's Young and Beautiful (2013), and wonder where the audience is supposed to take this. Bisset's presence suggests a more straightforward kind of anger, a Fatal Attraction kind of moment, which is another way this film teases it might be heading. In one sense Ozon asks questions he really has no intention of answering, and in the end the explanations are as ambiguous as the questions. But beyound cinematic reference, imagine the Coen Bros. if they were French strutcuralists. After all, as Foucault formulated it, 'saying yes to sex is not saying no to power'. Ozon's film is almost perfectly constructed around this paradox, as is Vacth, and that seems to be the point. It is a cinematic hall of mirrors, and at its centre is Marine Vacth, as if she were Ozon's Tippi Hedren for the supposedly sexually empowered 21^st century.

SODERBERGH'S SIDE EFFECTS: JUDE LAW & DISORDER

There was a point in Side Effects where I realised that what I was watching was an episode of Law & Order with compressed air pumped into it; perhaps it was as I started to envisage Elaine Stritch arguing to Sam Waterston that Rooney Mara had been driven beyond rational understanding by having to watch Jude Law act (call it Jude Law & Disorder?). Then the film began to morph, and starting trying to become an episode of Law & Order as it might have been directed by Alfred Hitchock, or someone thinking maybe he could be the next Hitch.

That may be somewhat harsh to what is an entertaining enough movie that I assume picked up a lot of serious cred because the critics and the Hollywood community saw it as an 'issue' film, and maybe because they were able to compare notes on their own prescriptions. Soderbergh has show he can keep this sort of movie moving along, playing with time sometimes, and, in this case, playing with style as well—imitating commercials, setting New York City backgrounds to reflect characters, and even recreating a perfect Edward Hopper shot. It is a pleasure to follow.

In effect, it's a film of two halves, as Law's British-educated psychiatrist, Jonathan Banks, first finds his career and life falling apart when a patient of his murders her husband while she's suffering side effects of drugs he's prescribed. Then it switches pace as the now rock-bottom Law begins to see a different pattern in what has happened, and manages to outwit the people who have outwitted the law as well as Law. That second half becomes very mechanical, and since some of it has been telegraphed – Catharine Zeta Jones seems always to be shot in a sort of dark-grained Seventies look that is the visual equivalent to those four bass notes on the movie-house organ – not least because horn-rimmed glasses do not a psychiatrist make; she's the least-likely shrink since Barbara Streisand in Prince Of Tides.

Law is actually perfect for the first part of the movie; he's got the classic film noir combination of being too cute for his own good and not half as smart as he thinks he is. He needed to pay attention when Emily tells him 'I thought sick people sometimes make things up.' Thus, as his life collapses around him, he's a break-down about to happen. It is also interesting the way his support system: wife and partners, desert him so quickly—this seems to be one of Soderbergh's major concerns, and indeed when the film is resolved it is with the family put back together, like a Disney film. The point seems to be that New York is rougher than Durham University. And in fact, Vinessa Shaw, as Banks' wife Deidre, seemed to be playing the wife in the film version of Jo Nesbo's Headhunters.

But in the second half, Law somehow manages to outsmart the two women who thus far have shown themselves to be smarter than him, and, in the case of Rooney Mara's Emily, capable of acting him under the table too. He seems to be morphing, with his devil's peak, into Kaiser Sosay. Mara's performance is somewhat flashy, in the sense that, like Tim Robbins in Mystic River, there's a lot of shuffling around, but it's at the edges that she really shines—the character isn't that far removed from Lisbeth Salander, but Mara is probably the challenger to Jennifer Lawrence right now.

Worth noting, however, is the lesbian undercurrent, another similarity with the Salander role. I kept thinking this was some kind of double-level play with Michael Douglas and Fatal Attraction, but it was pretty obvious rather early on that there was something going on, and it was a little disappointing to see that kind of Jerry Falwell male fantasy that has women lovers become husband-killers. Channing Tatum, the husband who's gone to jail for insider trading, and becomes the victim, seems almost as doped up as his wife, whether that's freedom, prison, or the effects of big financial business in New York I could not say. And I'm not sure why Mara's Emily would have to teach Dr Seifert about derivatives if what she were doing was simply shorting pharmaceutical stocks.

But the finish rings false until it gets to the single successful Hitchockian moment, Banks' revenge on Emily, by keeping her medicated in a facility. There are moments of late Fifties Hitch: the interview with Russell Jones excellent as the medical ethics investigator, or even Michael Nathanson's strangely detached DA. But there are others redolent of Law & Order, especially Polly Draper's scene-stealing turns as Emily's boss. In the end, however, as you watch Banks' partners, or the drug company reps, or the characters in the commercials, you begin to wonder if this is Soderbergh's foray into David Cronenberg territory, and how it would have played out had it gone in that direction. Side Effects proves yet again how facile and effective a genre director Soderbergh can be--you get the sense he looks at a script and breaks it down, then puts it back together in his own way, hopping genres. He would have been excellent in the old studio system, if he were allowed to be.

HOLLYWOOD'S PARIS, PARIS' HOLLYWOOD

What did the awards season tell us about the state of movies today? This year's list of Oscar nominees was perhaps the weakest I can recall; I could name a half a dozen films I liked better than any nominated by the Academy, yet none of them struck me as the kind of film I'd be comfortable calling a year's best. The critic Michael Goldfarb suggested that since the average age of Oscar voters is 62, it might reflect an inability of younger voters to respond to edgier work, but I think the reality is anchored more firmly into the idea of what Hollywood's over-sixties see as entertainment, and this year's awards reflect two connected impulses: those of self-reflection and nostalgia, as well as a certain preference for the fantasies of memory over reality. I'd be tempted to draw bigger analogies to America itself in the post-Reagan era—the belief in self-regarding fantasies rather than challenging or unpleasant reality seems to define a large part of the country-- but that's not our purpose here. What else does a farce like The Help constitute, if not a self-reflecting fantasy of the past, which rewrites history from a comfortable point of view of a present which itself is an indulgence? But the two biggest winners at the Oscars were both films about silent film, movies that put the movie industry (and the past) at the center of human experience.

Yet surely indulgence is the operative word when we consider the screenplay awards for Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris, a film which shines only in comparison to most of Allen's work in the past decade, and then mostly when he's revisiting familiar tropes from his past. It's very much like a blown-up version of an Allen short story, but given its place in Allen's canon it's theme of the idolised past not really being better (or practical) in the present, could be viewed as unfortunate. It's also lucky, in the sense that those Oscar-voting 62 year olds are probably the last generation for whom Hemingway and Fitzgerald were held up as literary gods, as well as romantic figures from history. It's an interesting conceit: Owen Wilson plays Gil, a writer making lots of money in the movies who wants to finish his novel, and comes to Paris looking for inspiration from the city of the 1920s (though not specifically for the Lost Generation—whose identity, after all, was based on having survived a savage, senseless war). His fiance thinks his career as a Hollywood hack is just fine, and is willing to indulge his dreaminess just so far. To stack the deck, Allen gives her the kind of parents who give nouveau riche a bad name, more gauche than rive-gauche, and a know-it-all professor friend with whom she's signalled early and often to have an affair—he's the kind of guy we expect Marshall McLuhan to come out of the crowd and correct.

On his own, Gil gets transported back to the 1920s and immediately meets Scott, Zelda, and Hem. He's encouraged in his writing, not least by Gertrude Stein, and he also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard) the woman of his demi-monde dreams, especially if he'd seen Amelie before he had those dreams. And that is the lesser of the two big problems with this film. Woody's Paris is about as real as Gil's Paris of the Twenties, that is, about as real as Woody's London was in Match Point; although in that film I thought Woody might have been influenced by Hitchock's Frenzy, and the unreality was part of its charm. It's presented in a visual homage to his opening of Manhattan, which was in part about Woody himself living in the past, but rather than convey the beauty and mystery of New York's kaleidoscope world, his Paris is a stereoscopic viewer full of picture postcards, the kind of thing my ABC colleagues used to run as shorthand to identify the which part of the wide world Wide World of Sports was visiting this week. His Paris is luxury hotels, top restaurants, museums where Carla Bruni is a guide, and the odd quirky shop whose odd quirky assistant will turn out to be Gil's soul-mate. It's a construct from the past as much as the 1920s are for his alter-ego.

But those 1920s are even more of a conceit in another way. Famous faces satisfy the received opinions of them. Woody's Hemingway talks, not like Hemingway may have talked, but like he wrote. Maybe that's because he's Gil's Hemingway, not Woody's? Though his takes on Scott and Zelda are good (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill are perfect as the doomed golden couple), and Kathy Bates' Stein is a hoot, the deeper we go into Gil's fantasy world, the more historical figures assume walk-on roles, to the point where they get introduced, we appreciate the likeness to the pictures of them on Wikipedia, and they walk off. At least they walk, so they can't be called tableaux vivants.So when Gil and his period flame Adriana themselves go back to the Belle Epoque, she stays there; she also sees the past as more attractive than her present (and never considers the time paradox: she mentions Gil in a book, which she wrote presumably after meeting him but before getting stuck in the belle epoque, but somehow managed to get published in the present.) Woody's conceit is much the same thing: Hollywood loves his film because it's literary, and speaks to a culture they remember but haven't participated in years. But for him it may serve a simpler point: in Manhattan the wonderful young girl went to Paris and he lost her; this time, the younger Woody played by Wilson--California rather than Manhattan but with a similar nasal voice--goes to Paris and finds her. It's that simple.

The Artist is an even more likeable movie, whose textured black and white images also recall the past, invoking all the glamour that was Hollywood in its heyday. But as it rechurns many of our favourite cliches form silent films, it as indulges a peculiarly French sense of style over substance—that a trench coat and cigarette is all it takes to hardboil a man. It's true that this was indeed the currency of silent film, but although it shows modern audiences that contemporary emotions can be expressed in silence, there is rarely a moment in The Artist where we sense the kind of gut-wrench which the best actors of the era could wring from their theatrical techniques. This is why I was particularly puzzled by Jean Dujardin's Oscar for best actor—his is a pleasing, but hardly challenging performance. Similarly, the film itself is hardly challenging; The Artist does little to play with the uses of silent film; Mel Brooks' Silent Movie was much more creative with what it did with the limits of silence. It's also significant that Silent Movie ended with Marcel Marceau 'speaking', whereas The Artist ends with the sound of tap: ironically one of the easiest for talking films to dub (and thus make dancers seem better than they are).

In much the same way Midnight In Paris' historical figures become less and less substantial as the film picks up speed, so too The Artist's story reverts more and more to cliches as it picks up speed. French cinema has always loved Hollywood's style, and paid it hommage, that trench coat and cigarette was for decades thought enough to transform even the most unlikely French actor (Catharine Denevue, anyone?) into Bogart—but The Artist's cliches are sometimes so historical as to be unrecognised by most of its audience, even our prototypical 62-year old Oscar voter. In this sense you can understand the plaudits for Dujardins' performance, which deserves plaudits for overcoming two handicaps. One is the strident one-note beat of his leading lady Peppy (Berenice Bejo) and the other, of course, is being upstaged by the dog.

Uggie, charming as he is, may indeed be the best metaphor for the film itself—for there isnt a single thing he does that we haven't seen Asta, or Rin Tin Tin, or Lassie, or Pete (the pup with the ring around his eye in the Little Rascals) do already. When today's audiences react to Uggie's big life-saving moment, it's with brand-new glee, which is understandable. You can't criticise them for falling for it, but we can chide Oscar voters for not knowing more, or better.

In which context, it is somewhat surprising that Hugo did not do better—although what The Artist has that Hugo doesn't, besides a dog, is the ability to project a sense of wonder without bogging it down in just the sort of knowingness I'm exhibiting in this essay, so maybe I am indeed demanding the impossible. Martin Scorsese's love of movies has been demonstrated before, in documentary fashion, and here it propels a story which engages his sense of wonder at the same time it loses ours, by turning into another worthy documentary, about the rediscovery of George Melies. To put it simply, the difference between The Artist and Hugo is that the former shows us the wonder of silent film, while the latter tells us about it.

I should confess now that I saw Hugo in 2D, so I can't evaluate fully Robert Richardson's Oscar for its use of 3D (except by visual inference) but it is exceedingly fascinating even when seen in two-dimensions. The film is gorgeous to follow, and Richardson constructs his shots around Scorsese's theme of the mechanical becoming human, and the human mechanical. But sadly, it's the performances which are the most mechanical thing in the film. The children sometimes look like they've been processed in CGI-- they may well come off two-dimensional when seen in 3D, but it's hard to warm to them, especially when they are together. Paris Montparnasse station is populated entirely by English actors who seem content to go through the paces of their well-established stage presences—not totally their fault because their stories are very lightly developed almost in silent film fashion (as we watch at a distance through Hugo's eyes)--except for Sacha Cohen's hammy Inspector Gustave, who would not be out of place in a silent film, or in a Clouseau tribute band. For a comedian whose success relies solely on playing with safe ethnic stereotypes, Cohen seems an odd choice to play a damaged but sensitive character, and it's as if his performance recognises that. Matching him with Emily Mortimer creates an interesting link with Allen's Match Point.

It was the film I liked best of these three, the most involving, but in the end, Hugo seems to lose interest in its most compelling story: the boy trapped in the station, and instead loses itself in the very familiar stories of the people within the station, presented with incredible low energy, and the history of silent film, presented with high energy focused on didactic explanation. Its Paris is a thing of wonder, but to Scorsese that wonder can't compare to the movies themselves. It fully deserved its haul of five technical Oscars, and indeed Scorsese's Golden Globe for best director might have been a better reward than was his Oscar for The Departed.

For Allen, Paris is a thing of wonder which inspires love and literature, for Scorsese it is a thing of wonder that inspires cinema. For and the movies can't compare to that. For The Artist's Michel Hazanavicius, Hollywood is a thing of wonder, where all is artifice, and only more artifice can redeem those nearly destroyed by it. For the 62 year olds who vote for Oscars, those pluckings at the strings of wonder appear to be all we need expect from our movies.

ANDREA MARIA SCHENKEL'S ICE COLD

Ice Cold covers familiar ground in an unusual manner. Andrea Schenkel's short novel details the stories of a number of victims of a serial killer in 1930s Berlin, then sets them against the confession of their killer, Josef Kalteis. Meanwhile, interwoven with these tales is the story of Kathie, a young country girl who comes to Munich entranced by the freedom and excitement of the city, but soon finds herself falling into a sort of desperate life of casual amateur prostitution. Inevitably, her path and Kalteis' are doomed to cross.

The originality of this approach hides its familiarity. If Kathie's path is reminiscent of Louise Brooks' Lulu, the scene with two cycling brothers neatly details not only the sense of a price fallen women must pay, which forms the core of much serial killer fiction, but also the very real innocence behind Kathie's 'fall'. She is not, like the fornicating babysitters of modern horror movies, shown as somehow inviting her demise, rather her simple desperation aimed at finding a place to sleep is set against the powerlessness which brings out a very different sort of response from Kalteis. But the sense of inevitable doom, which recalls Murnau and many other films of the period, is engineered delicately and precisely.

Kalteis seems based, loosely, on Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf vampire, with one crucial difference. The Weimar era was Germany's first golden age of serial killers; Schenkel's setting the killings in the Nazi era articulates them against a different backdrop, one in which female sexuality, often seen as the provocation for the Weimar serial killers, is less a matter of modern empowerment as a reaction to the relative lack of economic power within the new system. In other words, an echo of the particular story of Kathie described above. Like Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, Schenkel's setting is within a system which refuses to allow for the existence of serial killers within it, though Schenkel doesn't actually make much of the ulitmate ambiguity of this system's dedication to its own serial killing on a far larger scale. But her portrayal of Kurteis, pathetically almost unaware of his own actions, is also familiar; it was set out by Colin Wilson, among others, in his study of Kurten, and shows a marked sociopathology which perhaps suggests something more universal within the Germany of the time.

Serial killers reflected Hannah Arendt's famed 'banality of evil' just as surely as the Eichmanns of the Nazi death machine, and perhaps it is here where Schenkel's implied parallel is most accurate. Though this interpretation would be easy to miss. There is a difficulty in that, interpreted through our modern victim culture, Kalteis becomes a stock villain, an abusive man, and this more personal approach is something reinforced by the translation. I cannot say how some of the speech, not just Kalteis' but other characters' as well, is meant to be presented, but I assume it was written in some sort of German slang. It is translated into a kind of mockney right out of a 1930s movie. I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but the effect is to recall Hitchock's The Lodger, say, not Pabst's Lulu, removing the sense of temptress and guilt from Kathie, which is good, but somehow removing from Kalteis a general sense being a force within an evil world, his Nazi context if you will, and place him instead as a mundane evil everyman.

The strong point of Ice Cold is that it is, indeed, ice cold (the German title was Kalteis, but this one works far better). We build a certain amount of sympathy for Kathie, as we follow her story knowng she must be doomed, but there is a palpable lack of horror, of feeling, from most of the characters; some understated expressions of loss, but mostly a certain sense of acceptance of this unnatural violence. As if it is already their world. And perhaps this was Schenkel's point after all, using the idea of the serial killer and the sex murder to crystallize something more horrific on a far larger scale, an acceptance of a slightly twisted world, which became far more than slightly twisted. It's a lot to read into, indeed to ask, of such a compact mood piece, but I think it works on that level as well as that of a thriller.

Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel translated by Anthea Bell Quercus, £9.99 ISBN 9781847245656