Vivacious, neurotic and stubborn, with imploring eyes and cheeks that take on arosy flush when photographed on film, NadiaTereszkiewicz, star of this spring’s Cannes Un Certain Regard highlightHeads or Tails?, is the next great French film actress, and her emotional febrility makes her agood 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’sTwo Pianos, opens the film already stricken with half-concealed anxiety, flirting with her husband Pierre (Jeremy Lewin) and demanding he tell her astory, as away of calming her down before aparty she doesn’t want to go to. Perhaps she had apremonition – in the elevator, she has an unexpected reunion with pianist Mathias (François Civil), amutually 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 afuneral over aloved one’sgrave.
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Mathias was once aconcert pianist of great promise, but left his and Claude’s hometown of Lyon under acloud, 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 afour-handed piece for her career-capping concert. Rampling, with atight-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– ahistory that returns with avengeance in the person of aboy, glimpsed on alocal playground, who looks just like him at the sameage.
Initially amagic-realist flourish, the boy’s resemblance to Mathias actually has alogical explanation – avery logical one, in fact. Though the script, by Desplechin and Kamen Velkovsky, begins with aflurry of coincidences – afolk story retold in the film’s first few minutes, about an eerie moment of psychic connection between aphysically separated husband and wife, foreshadows acut later cut from apiano chord to asudden heart attack, as if the former had triggered the latter – the film sees Desplechin in awell-behaved mode. Rare for his filmography, the narrative has clear stakes: Will Mathias stay in Lyon, giving up his vocation for achance to rewrite his past, or will he move on, honoring his gift and burying his old self? This could be aCameron Crowe movie, with the caveat that Crowe would probably be less casual about infidelity.
Desplechin indulges in afew of his trademark stylistic and storytelling tics – jump cuts and an iris effect; aletter read aloud by its writer, direct to camera and ablurt 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 asuave smile to belie the bitter ambivalence of his drama, butTwo Pianos simply goes down smooth.