Jeune Femme / L'Amanat Double (both 2017)

Some weekends it's seeing Solo twice, others I end up seeing nothing but French language films.

C'est la vie, as they say ... somewhere.

Jeune Femme is also known by the international title of Montparnasse Bienvenue (because Jeune Femme was so difficult for international audiences to pronounce?). It's chiefly a character study of Paula, a young (she would argue with this definition) woman trying to find her place in the world after being dumped out of her cushioned existence by her photographer ex-boyfriend.

She's introduced to the audience while head-butting a door and screaming at her boyfriend, and she's pretty much full-on from that point.

Self-absorbed, spoiled, and apparently without a useful survival skill in the world, she doesn't start as the most sympathetic character, but the film peels away at her layers, even as she tries to put more on as she tries out different identities, and with its climax gives a sense of what happened to throw her life so off course in the first decade of her adult life.

It's a smartly-made film. Definitely won't appeal to all, but it's rewarding to those for whom it will.

L'Amant Double (the Double Lover) is on a completely different level. A mind-bending, lurid, psychosexual thriller, it's been described by some as Hitchcockian, but I'd call it more De Palma-esque, as it's at least two degrees removed from Hitchock.

It's a film that probably requires two sittings, just to try and figure out where all the joins are. While I was watching, I developed at least five different theories about what was going on, and in my scattershot approach actually managed to pick-up on some of the clues that were layered into the film.

Again this definitely doesn't have broad appeal. It's an insane, exploitative, slow-burning piece of cinema with emotionally-distant characters. On the positive side, its completely bonkers execution and twisty-turning plot can be a lot of fun.