Critics reviews

There's never a sense that [Virginia is] being belittled or judged [by the director]. The real problem is that Ozon can't quite decide whether he's making the crowd-pleasing tale of a cross-dresser's empowerment or the thornier, more compelling tale of a woman who tries to recreate her dead best friend, Vertigo-style (and then sleep with her).

The film has a nice sense of female friendships' emotional depth. But as a woman, Duris (while amusing) is not much more convincing than Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in "Some Like It Hot.

While Rendell and Ozon share a Hitchcockian perversity, the filmmaker has a love for camp all his own.

Regardless of the setup's shrilly artificial nature, there's no reason why it couldn't have been channeled into an affectingly overblown exploration of the porous boundaries between love, desire, and friendship. But Ozon is incapable of establishing the continuity of tone that would allow this to be achieved, encouraging us to laugh at his characters one minute and emote with them the next in a way that renders identification impossible.

Based on a Ruth Rendell story, François Ozon's delightful, intermittently morbid drama-lite offers his most textured meditation on gender identity since Water Drops on Burning Rocks (00) while also recalling his playful short A Summer Dress (96).

An alluring, sharp-witted picture.

In tweaking Rendell's unfashionably creepy ending for a new era, Ozon feels very on-message, resolving the situation with an impeccably nice, debatably wishy-washy fantasy of progressive contentment. You can thoroughly appreciate the gesture, while wishing he'd played it more ardently, and for keeps.

The film doesn't even seem to know whose idea the transformation is, or why power would play an important role in a friendship fraught with S&M variables, imbalanced privilege and unspoken desires. These aren't so much parts integral to a whole as marks on a checklist of possible approaches. The New Girlfriend is perhaps best experienced as variations on a theme, rather than an organically developed story; I just wish that were the experience Ozon had intended.

Rarely has this French master analyzed the cracks in his characters’ bourgeois facades to such smooth and pleasurable effect.