Two Pianos – first-look review

Vivacious, neurotic and stubborn, with imploring eyes and cheeks that take on a rosy flush when photographed on film, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, star of this spring’s Cannes Un Certain Regard highlight Heads or Tails?, is the next great French film actress, and her emotional febrility makes her a good fit for the cinema of Arnaud Desplechin, who instructs his actors to deliver their lines with feelings that don’t match the words, the better to capture the moody inconsistencies that govern their characters’ chaotic and contradictory passions.

Claude, Tereszkiewicz’s character in Desplechin’s Two Pianos, opens the film already stricken with half-concealed anxiety, flirting with her husband Pierre (Jeremy Lewin) and demanding he tell her a story, as a way of calming her down before a party she doesn’t want to go to. Perhaps she had a premonition – in the elevator, she has an unexpected reunion with pianist Mathias (François Civil), a mutually traumatizing meet-uncute that causes him to faint and her to flee, and setting their characters on an odyssey of romantic nostalgia, passionate abandon, wounded recrimination, grief and guilt and frustration, and one Jewish joke in very poor taste told by Claude at a funeral over a loved one’s grave. 

Mathias was once a concert pianist of great promise, but left his and Claude’s hometown of Lyon under a cloud, squandering his talent on teaching gigs in Asia and alcoholism (both to the great chagrin of his agent Max, played by Desplechin regular Hippolyte Girardot with comically exaggerated and quick-passing arm-swinging aggravation). His old mentor Elena (Charlotte Rampling) has called him back to his hometown for the first time since his youth, to rehearse a four-handed piece for her career-capping concert. Rampling, with a tight-lipped severity around her mouth but regal mischief in her eyes, is ideally cast as an exacting virtuoso, and her demands on Mathias’ buried genius are one major chord in the film, harmonized with one on the resumption of the history he left Lyon without resolving – a history that returns with a vengeance in the person of a boy, glimpsed on a local playground, who looks just like him at the same age.

Initially a magic-realist flourish, the boy’s resemblance to Mathias actually has a logical explanation – a very logical one, in fact. Though the script, by Desplechin and Kamen Velkovsky, begins with a flurry of coincidences – a folk story retold in the film’s first few minutes, about an eerie moment of psychic connection between a physically separated husband and wife, foreshadows a cut later cut from a piano chord to a sudden heart attack, as if the former had triggered the latter – the film sees Desplechin in a well-behaved mode. Rare for his filmography, the narrative has clear stakes: Will Mathias stay in Lyon, giving up his vocation for a chance to rewrite his past, or will he move on, honoring his gift and burying his old self? This could be a Cameron Crowe movie, with the caveat that Crowe would probably be less casual about infidelity.

Desplechin indulges in a few of his trademark stylistic and storytelling tics – jump cuts and an iris effect; a letter read aloud by its writer, direct to camera and a blurt of painful-looking slapstick against the grain of the scene – but only sparingly. His suave and responsive filmmaking, characterized here by Paul Guilhaume’s light-sensitive and fine-grained cinematography, usually works as a suave smile to belie the bitter ambivalence of his drama, but Two Pianos simply goes down smooth.