Jérémie Renier as Paul and Marine Vacth as Chloé in L'Amant Double. Photo / YouTube
Jérémie Renier as Paul and Marine Vacth as Chloé in L'Amant Double. Photo / YouTube
There has been no shortage of graphic sex scenes at Cannes Film Festival over the years.
Think back to Gaspar Noé's pornographic Love, for which 3-D glasses were handed out at its screening in 2015 so that one ejaculatory shot felt like it was aimed at the audience.
Or to2013's Palme d'Or winning drama Blue is the Warmest Colour, which includes a seven-minute scene between two French lesbian lovers that is hard to forget. Then, at last year's festival, there was the outrageous lesbian-discovery sequence in The Handmaiden, Park Chan-Wook's lascivious period thriller.
L'Amant Double. Photo / YouTube
Point is, Cannes and cinematic carnality are old friends. Taking the prize for Most Sexually Shocking Film this year is Francois Ozon's L'Amant Double, a psycho-suspense thriller that opens with an extreme close-up of Marine Vacth's vagina.
"Playful outrage is often the name of the game with François Ozon, but he's outdone himself in this film," says the Telegraph's film critic Tim Robey, who was present at the screening.
"Incredulous guffaws greeted the opening shot, as the camera emerges backwards from a vaginoscopy, almost like it's being born. After this declaration of intent, later developments involving two Jérémie Reniers in a breathless threesome, and a scene involving a sex toy, were received not with gasps of shock, but appreciative delight."
Explicit imagery continues with camera entering Vacth's mouth and zooming down to an internal shot of her climaxing. The film, about an ex-model in therapy who ends up with two lovers (who are twins), clocks in at 105 minutes, and is "knowingly outrageous and good fun," according to The Telegraph's Robbie Collin.
