Vivacious, neurotic and cussed, with imploring eyes and cheeks that tackle a rosy flush when photographed on movie, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, star of this spring’s Cannes Un Sure Regard spotlight Heads or Tails?, is the subsequent nice French movie actress, and her emotional febrility makes her a good match for the cinema of Arnaud Desplechin, who instructs his actors to ship their traces with emotions that don’t match the phrases, the higher to seize the moody inconsistencies that govern their characters’ chaotic and contradictory passions.
Claude, Tereszkiewicz’s character in Desplechin’s Two Pianos, opens the movie already stricken with half-concealed anxiousness, flirting along with her husband Pierre (Jeremy Lewin) and demanding he inform her a story, as a means of calming her down earlier than a social gathering she doesn’t wish to go to. Maybe she had a premonition – within the elevator, she has an surprising 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 style advised by Claude at a funeral over a cherished one’s grave.
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Mathias was as soon as a live performance pianist of nice promise, however left his and Claude’s hometown of Lyon underneath a cloud, squandering his expertise on instructing gigs in Asia and alcoholism (each to the good chagrin of his agent Max, performed by Desplechin common Hippolyte Girardot with comically exaggerated and quick-passing arm-swinging aggravation). His outdated mentor Elena (Charlotte Rampling) has referred to as him again to his hometown for the primary time since his youth, to rehearse a four-handed piece for her career-capping live performance. Rampling, with a tight-lipped severity round her mouth however regal mischief in her eyes, is ideally forged as an exacting virtuoso, and her calls for on Mathias’ buried genius are one main chord within the movie, harmonized with one on the resumption of the historical past he left Lyon with out resolving – a historical past that returns with a vengeance within the individual of a boy, glimpsed on a native playground, who seems to be similar to him on the identical age.
Initially a magic-realist flourish, the boy’s resemblance to Mathias really has a logical rationalization – a very logical one, actually. Although the script, by Desplechin and Kamen Velkovsky, begins with a flurry of coincidences – a people story retold within the movie’s first couple of minutes, about an eerie second of psychic connection between a bodily separated husband and spouse, foreshadows a reduce later reduce from a piano chord to a sudden coronary heart assault, as if the previous had triggered the latter – the movie sees Desplechin in a well-behaved mode. Uncommon for his filmography, the narrative has clear stakes: Will Mathias keep in Lyon, giving up his vocation for a probability to rewrite his previous, or will he transfer on, honoring his reward and burying his outdated self? This might be a Cameron Crowe film, with the caveat that Crowe would in all probability be much less informal about infidelity.
Desplechin indulges in a few of his trademark stylistic and storytelling tics – leap cuts and an iris impact; a letter learn aloud by its author, direct to digicam and a blurt of painful-looking slapstick towards the grain of the scene – however solely sparingly. His suave and responsive filmmaking, characterised right here by Paul Guilhaume’s light-sensitive and fine-grained cinematography, often works as a suave smile to belie the bitter ambivalence of his drama, however Two Pianos merely goes down clean.
