Dir. Arnaud Desplechin. France. 2025. 115mins
Two Pianos, the latest drama from French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin, will certainly lead you on a fraught emotional dance. The beaming smile of The Three Musketeers star Francois Civil slips away – for the moment, at least – when he plays Mathias Vogler, a Byronesque but brilliant concert pianist tortured by doubt. Desplechin is essentially using music as a metaphor for the vast emotional range and vicissitudes of the highly creative mind.
Lyon makes an evocative backcloth for this doomed tale of love, longing and loss played in a minor key but with Desplechin’s full orchestral manoeuvres in a narrative that occasionally leaves us exasperated. That said, there are some inspired visual ideas and three intuitive performances from Civil and his co-stars Charlotte Rampling and Nadia Tereszkiewicz.
This is a French love story par excellence playing on a full emotional range. It starts with a married couple Pierre (Jeremy Lewin), a gallery owner, and Claude (Tereszkiewicz) who looks after their young son Simon, sharing an intimate moment over an amusing Jewish joke. Claude pulls the strings teasing Pierre about leaving her, while knowing she has his undying love.
Meanwhile on the other side of town Mathias has just flown back from Japan on a concert tour and is eager to catch up with his mentor, piano diva Elena (Rampling), who is soon to leave the concert stage.
Mathias is a closet alcoholic prone to bouts of drinking himself to oblivion, and one such episode kicks off when he sees his former lover Claude coming out of a lift, causing him to collapse into a swoon. At the same time Mathias has developed a morbid fascination for a young boy in a park. No he’s not a part-time paedophile: these scenes are confusing, but eventually make more sense once the drama gets fully underway. It soon emerges these two highly emotive encounters have destabilised Mathias who starts to question his entire existence, uncoupling him from his professional resolve to pursue musical genius.
The dazzled pianist goes off the rails applying for a low-level job in Lyon, exploring unfinished business with the flirty Claude, who loves the idea of being in love but who rejects his renewed advances, toying with Mathias and their palpable passion for each other. This unrequited lust for Claude then spills over into a brief affair with Pierre’s younger sister Judith. (Alba Gaïa Bellugi). Rampling is the consummate professional, serene on the outside while suffering desperate stage fright behind the scenes in her ‘swansong’. Other plot lines add to the sense of loss and yearning, but to reveal these would spoil what is a discombobulating but ravishing drama.
On the sidelines, there is ample onscreen (and emotional) support for Mathias in the shape of his his mother (Marianne Pommier) and his longtime agent Hippolyte Girardot who adds a dash of light humour and wit to this otherwise melodramatic maelstrom. @MeredithTaylor
IN FRENCH CINEMAS | WORLD PREMIERE TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2025