Sure, it’s kinky, but Ozon is having fun with it, to the extent that the entire film rewards that fetish all moviegoers have in common — voyeurism — offering up a kind of equal-opportunity objectification.

It’s a fantasy not of sexual satisfaction but sexual accomplishment, and perhaps no director other than Ozon would have the imagination and panache to carry it off.

The cinematic trickery on display – lurid dissolves, off-kilter juxtapositions, and bizarre dance numbers bouncing around Chloe’s brittle mindscape – compensates for the skin-deep thematics, and keep the rhythm of the film popping.

It’s difficult to know just how serious this is all meant to be. Then again, camp only really works when the level of intention is difficult to decipher.

Double Lover may not represent Ozon in peak form but it’s too weirdly entertaining to dismiss out-of-hand.

Its tale of doubles, deception and desire allows Ozon to fool around with some of his favorite themes — the turbulent inner lives of complex women, the distance between appearance and reality, the essential unknowability of even our most intimate loved ones, the necessity of imagination in enduring everyday life.

Though Double Lover has a slight oneiric quality from the start, it grows increasingly delirious, the plot threads knotting in convoluted patterns and the overall mood more and more ridiculous.

There are plenty of elements to admire in Amant Double but the endless twists and revelations grow tiresome.

A fitfully amusing erotic thriller in which nothing is what it seems, anything could happen, and everything is at least a little ridiculous.

It’s a wildly dated-looking and derivative film, a quaint adventure in fantasised naughtiness.