THE STORY – Mathias, a virtuoso French pianist who lived in Asia for many years, returns to his hometown of Lyon to experience an impossible love story.
THE CAST – François Civil, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Charlotte Rampling & Hippolyte Girardot
THE TEAM – Arnaud Desplechin (Director/Writer) & Kamen Velkovsky (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 115 Minutes
All storytelling is a promise from the storyteller to their audience: “Follow me through all I tell you, and even though it may feel scattered, everything will come together by the end.” The audience puts their trust in the storyteller to keep their end of the bargain, to not waste their time with story threads and character arcs that go nowhere or contribute nothing to the overall story. If keeping that promise is an indicator of a storyteller’s skill, then Arnaud Desplechin’s skill has failed him with his latest, “Two Pianos.” As usual, he has concocted an intriguing premise with myriad interconnected ideas and themes, populated by fascinating characters. Unfortunately, he doesn’t follow through on enough of them for the film to be a satisfying experience.
Virtuoso pianist Mathias Vogler (François Civil) has spent the past several years in a self-imposed exile in Asia. When his childhood mentor, Elena (Charlotte Rampling), invites him back to his hometown of Lyon to perform with her in a series of concerts, he accepts, more because she never takes “no” for an answer than because he actually wants to. On his first night back home, he runs into Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a friend with whom he had an affair many years ago. The next day, he spots a child who looks uncannily like a younger version of himself, who just so happens to be Claude’s son. Being back home, seeing Claude, and now seeing her son within such a short time frame throws Mathias for a loop. Before long, he’s back in the fragile mental state he had left Lyon to fix. With Elena starting to suffer from her own mental problems, will the concerts go on as planned?
As always, Desplechin writes fascinating characters that provide a showcase for his actors. It’s obvious quite early on why the legendary Rampling would want to work with him. Elena has all the imperiousness one would expect of a virtuoso musician, and she’s stern in rehearsals, even to her prized former student Mathias. However, her age is catching up with her, and she struggles to conceal the vulnerability she now feels as a result. She also genuinely cares about Mathias as a human being, even though she pragmatically cares about him more as a necessary member of her concert ensemble. It’s a character perfectly tailored to Rampling’s strengths as a performer, and she repays Desplechin with an astutely judged performance.
Civil has made quite the name for himself in recent years, earning back-to-back César nominations for Best Supporting Actor in 2022 (“BAC Nord”) and 2023 (“Rise”). His performance here confirms him as one of the most talented actors of his generation. Desplechin runs Mathias through a gamut of emotions, each more intense than the last, and Civil does dynamic work navigating the ups and downs in his mood, making sense out of the tangled mess that is Mathias’s headspace. While the script leaves large chunks of these characters’ backstories to our imaginations, where Civil draws the relationships between Mathias and those around him with piercing clarity, revealing every single trigger in Mathias’s psyche. He cultivates genuine chemistry with all his scene partners, serving as a sturdy anchor even when the film threatens to go off the rails with the sheer number of ideas and subplots at play.
The film’s biggest problem, though, is that there are so many ideas and themes at play here. “Two Pianos” is at once a story about identity, aging musicians, memory (and the loss of it), the dangers of pragmatism, the treatment of young music prodigies and how it affects them as they age, overcoming addiction, and the lies we tell ourselves and others to justify our choices. All of these ideas are connected, but none of them rise to the top to become an overarching theme that unites them all. Not every narrative has to tie everything up neatly in a nice little bow, but the way Desplechin tosses out new thematic content with abandon every few scenes leads to the film feeling unfocused and messy. Real life is often unfocused and messy, too, but that’s an incredibly bland, basic thing for a film this rich with possibility to be saying. Even though each individual idea here is fascinating, Desplechin doesn’t give any of them enough screentime to really delve into them, forcing himself to settle for just scratching the surface. In that way, “Two Pianos” almost feels like an adaptation of a novel; it’s easy to imagine these themes getting far more fleshed out, and even more interconnected and complex, with the extra space a novel affords. Unfortunately, this is an original film, and Desplechin has let his ideas get in the way of telling a good story. While there’s plenty of interesting material in “Two Pianos,” none of it comes together in the end. It’s a lot of notes searching for a melody.
