Two Pianos (Deux Pianos)

 

Director Arnaud Desplechin

Desplechin with François Civil

Desplechin with Nadia Tereszkiewicz

Civil and Tereszkiewicz

Charlotte Rampling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWO PIANOS (Deux Pianos)           B+                                                                             France  (115 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Arnaud Desplechin

Desplechin developed a reputation for writing some of the most natural dialogue in the movie industry, starting with MY SEX LIFE…OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (1996), ESTHER KHAN (2000), KINGS & QUEEN (2004), and A CHRISTMAS TALE (2008), using a revolving stable of actors who moved on to impressive careers, while more recently he’s dabbled in smaller projects, 2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse), a romantic and nostalgic take on memory and first love in this coming-of-age prequel to MY SEX LIFE, and Deception (Tromperie) (2021), an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel, where the lead protagonist, a novelist, describes himself as “a talk fetishist!” in one of the many conversations before, during, and after sex.  Desplechin also directed theatrical playwright August Strindberg’s The Father in 2015 and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in early 2020, both playing at the esteemed Comédie-Française in Paris, where his innate sense of staging is evident here in an unconventional film featuring characters who are thrown into the middle of chaos.  All his films are intellectually challenging, dramatically compelling, and always curious, demonstrating a remarkable consistency in churning out quality films.  This is unlike anything else he’s ever done, particularly the way the story slowly advances, with frequent use of disorienting jump cuts and plenty of unspoken details, literally defying audience expectations with a non-resolution, growing smaller and smaller in scope, yet continually challenging audiences in unorthodox ways, adding to the magic and the mystery. Falling off the map in terms of accessibility, it’s hard to find Desplechin films anymore, even on streaming platforms, where his previous film is still unavailable in the United States, though they were once a staple of international arthouse films.  Known for his wit and literary inspirations, and for producing quality soul-bearing performances from a mix of known and unknown actors, this feels like the kind of film we used to see on a regular basis, but has disappeared from the landscape, so discovering this small gem is like rediscovering a bit of ourselves, a reminder of why we value cinema so much.  The original story and scenario were conceived by Arnaud Desplechin and Kamen Velkovsky, and then developed into a screenplay alongside Ondine Lauriot dit Prévost with collaboration from novelist Anne Berest.  In some ways it recalls Denis Dercourt’s THE PAGE TURNER (2006), a French psychological thriller revolving around a piano audition gone wrong, or the gritty underworld thriller by Jacques Audiard, The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeu... (2005), where a debt-collecting thug develops an interest in playing classical piano, like Zen therapy, also revolving around a piano audition, where in each case the serene calmness of the classical music world stands in stark contrast to the chaotic violence of the central storyline.  The original music is composed by Grégoire Hetzel in his 9th Desplechin film, but also Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010), where the marvelous AMÉLIE-sounding accordion-led song over the end credits is a reminder that we’re watching a French film, even though it’s Italian, Parole di vento composed by Franco Ghigini YouTube (4:30).

In this case Desplechin mixes together two storylines about impossible love, an homage to Leo McCarey’s AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (1957), the tale of a woman whose fate was sealed when she was very young because she had a child, and another story about a pianist who returns to his home country and catches sight of a child who is his exact double, sounding very much like a German fairy tale steeped in mystery, with the filmmaker returning to some of his favorite themes, psychologically charged homecomings and unexpected reunions.  Once a virtuoso child prodigy at the piano, Mathias (François Civil from Larry Abrahamson’s 2014 Top Ten List #10 Frank) returns to his provincial hometown of Lyon after spending eight years abroad teaching and performing in Japan, summoned by his mentor Eléna (Charlotte Rampling in her best role since 2016 in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years), a celebrated older pianist who plans to retire and hopes he can perform with her in a concert for two pianos and orchestra in what will be her final performance.  Shooting in a city rarely featured in French films, other than Bertrand Tavernier and Lumière’s first studio, Desplechin showcases some iconic locations in Lyon, including the Parc de la Tête d'or, the two rivers running through the city, the cobblestone streets of Vieux Lyon, the city’s oldest district, and the Maurice Ravel Auditorium.  Arriving straight from the airport to a party in Eléna’s honor, still disheveled and disoriented and underdressed, where he is handed a tie at the door to look more formally appropriate, he mingles with her briefly before making a quick exit, but as he leaves he comes face to face with an arriving woman, Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz, impressive in Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine (Mon Crime) (2023), causing her to run right back out the door while Mathias faints on the spot.  More than foreshadowing, this sets the tone for the emotional turmoil that follows, as there’s an element of psychological unease lying beneath the surface for the rest of the film, which explores the source of this tension, as there is obvious emotional baggage that Mathias is carrying, like open scars that he cannot escape, as Claude is married to art gallery owner Pierre (Jérémy Lewin), his childhood best friend and rival in love, and the reason he fled to Japan.  The volatile temperament for such a talented artist comes as a surprise, as musicians are usually expressed by strict rigor and discipline, but this guy is all over the place, an artist in conflict with his own art, invariably too wrapped up in his own self-created problems.  Plunging him into bouts of heavy drinking, Mathias gets stinking drunk afterwards, with his benevolent, all-encompassing, father figure agent Max (Hippolyte Girardot) looking out for him, waiting patiently for him to wake up in the jail’s drunk tank, while Pierre dies suddenly in a car accident, leaving Claude stunned and devastated, left to raise her child Simon (Valentin Picard) alone.  While wandering through a park afterwards, Mathias can’t take his eyes off Simon for some reason, perched at the top of the pyramid on the playground, locking eyes just before he falls from a great height, but survives intact, amazingly, where it’s just a scare, but Mathias can’t help but think this child looks just like him at that age, asking his mother to pull out a family photo to confirm his suspicions.

An alluring mystery where music, memory, and identity merge and threaten to overwhelm the tender psyche of a virtuosic pianist, this homecoming does not go as planned, as Mathias is not that invincible force of nature that serious performing artists tend to be, like the touring performance artist Eléna, who reminds him at the party, “I was built for war,” as she chastises him for not touring constantly and sharing his gift to the world.  Her implacable reserve commands respect, protecting herself like a mighty fortress, but this icy demeanor allows her to go anywhere at any time and play without the use of a score, committing it all to memory, like a force of nature.  Mathias, on the other hand, has tragic weaknesses, where both he and Claude share deeply buried passions and unspoken truths that bond them together, yet they can’t be together, as long ago she chose Pierre, leaving him completely devastated.  This has left him more passive and emotionally vulnerable, as he’s still in love with her, which is evident every moment they spend together, as sparks are in the air, with surprising results, as she welcomes that undivided attention, especially in her grief, but she’s also not ready to commit to him, even as he devours her with his eyes.  Channeling his lust for Claude spills over into a brief affair with Pierre’s younger sister and Claude’s best friend, Judith (Alba Gaïa Bellugi).  The acting in this film is superb, brilliantly filmed in ‘Scope by Paul Guilhaume, who recently filmed two of Jacques Audiard’s most impressive looking films, 2021 #6 Film of the Year Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e) in black and white and the colorful musical Emilia Pérez (2024).  His constant handheld camera movements create an unbearable suspense, shooting without dollies, without tracking shots, and without a tripod, always countering the classicism of the story they were telling.  Centered around our biggest regrets, music plays a big role in the film, with selected classical pieces by Bartók, Debussy, Chopin, and Bach, lofty giants that performers can find refuge in the complexities of their music, which is the same thing that happens here, with the music expressing underlying emotional layers that can never be expressed verbally.  Mixing old world and new world characters, the film is a kind of fantasy-melodrama, much of it taking place in interior spaces, where the three main multi-lingual performers, Civil, Tereszkiewicz, and Rampling beautifully portray just how profoundly debilitating their respective emotional worlds can be, like pulling the rug out from underneath them, sending them into a dizzying freefall without a clue where they will land.  These are stories of isolated characters who come together for an all-too brief moment and embrace in order to escape the depths of their solitude, weighed down by grief and sorrow, then inevitably return to it, as this solitude is obviously a protective strength for them.  The film is pure poetry, exploring the underlying layers of emotional worlds that is rare to see, not with this degree of assurance, which feels surprising in this day and age, and altogether missing in modern American films, yet it is the essence of cinema in the best possible sense, as beauty is timeless.  While he may not be spoken in the same breath as Rivette, Rohmer, or even Truffaut, Desplechin is a major force in world cinema.

The Crime Is Mine (Mon Crime)

 

Director François Ozon

Ozon with Rebecca Marder and Nadia Tereszkiewicz

Ozon with Fabrice Luchini and Isabelle Huppert

THE CRIME IS MINE (Mon Crime)            B                                                                      France  (102 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: François Ozon

Doing justice has nothing to do with what’s just.                                                                          —Judge Gustave Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini)

Following the earlier works of 8 WOMEN (2002) and Potiche (2010), set in the 50’s and 70’s, Ozon has crafted a third installment in a trilogy of films exploring the status of women, specifically “the hold men have over women,” where this may be France’s answer to the #MeToo movement, a campaign against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture in which survivors, led by the voices of women, especially public figures, share their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment.  In France, a person who makes a sexual harassment complaint at work is reprimanded or fired 40% of the time, while the accused person is typically not investigated or punished at all ("'Revolt' in France Against Sexual Harassment Hits Cultural Resistance").  The Harvey Weinstein scandal of sexual abuse allegations played a pivotal role in the emergence and global spread of the #MeToo movement in 2017, when more than eighty women accused Weinstein of sexual assault, harassment, and rape over a period of thirty years, where casting couch practices (soliciting sexual favors from a job applicant in exchange for employment) skewed the sexual politics of Hollywood, which normalized the behavior due to the prevalence of sexually aggressive men with positions of authority in the film industry.  While this serves as a backdrop to the film, Ozon has turned it into a hilarious sex farce moving at a breakneck pace, told with a light tone of sophistication and irreverence through the point of view of several enterprising women who turn tragedy into financial success beyond their dreams, with obvious allusions to Harvey Weinstein and his “invitations” for actresses to audition for him, which is just an excuse to sexually take advantage of them.  Freely adapted by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo from the 1934 French play Mon Crime by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil where the protagonists were husband and wife, it has twice been adapted into Hollywood screwball romps, featuring Carole Lombard in Wesley Ruggles’ TRUE CONFESSION (1937) and Betty Hutton in John Berry’s CROSS MY HEART (1946).  Set in a romanticized Paris during the 1930’s, it opens with a theatrical curtain rising, followed by an inert shot of a view across the pool leading to a massive estate, where we hear shouting in the distance before a frantic young woman rushes away in tears, making her way down a crowded city street bumping into people.  This is our introduction to Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a struggling blonde actress with her brunette friend Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), an out-of-work lawyer with no cases, sharing a cramped Parisian studio where they are forced to share a single bed.  Behind on their rent, they do a diversionary two-step dance with the landlord, a somewhat feeble-minded man, making short work of his true intentions to collect payment as he is easily distracted by the teasing manner of their fake histrionics, pleading poverty as if it was a virtue, always claiming they have the best of intentions.  Madeleine’s boyfriend is André Bonnard (Édouard Sulpice), the heir to a huge Bonnard tire fortune, making him an excellent marriage prospect and the answer to their problems, but he refuses to work or even accept money from his father (André Dussollier), so he’s really a layabout, of no help whatsoever.  While there is a hint of queer attraction on the part of Pauline for Madeleine, and are even shown bathing together, but nothing ever develops, as the actress seems oblivious to it.     

Making things worse, they are paid a visit by Inspector Brun (Régis Laspalès), who informs them that famous theater producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), the massively wealthy older man Madeleine met before her rapid departure, was found murdered, making her a suspect, as she was one of the last to see him before she left under questionable circumstances.  Describing him as a “dirty old pig” who wouldn’t stop grabbing her at an audition, willing to offer her a job only if she agreed to have sex with him, she quickly dismissed his offer, refusing to trade her body for a coveted role.  Undeterred by the news, the women quickly go out to the cinema, watching Billy Wilder’s first directorial effort, his only European film, MAUVAISE GRAINE (BAD SEED) (1934), a story about a good-for-nothing playboy (mirroring André) who enjoys a hedonistic lifestyle thanks to his father’s immense wealth and ends up joining a gang of car thieves.  Shot in France during Wilder’s migration from Germany to the United States when he was fleeing from the threat of the Nazis, the film stars Danielle Darrieux, one of the original eight women in Ozon’s EIGHT WOMEN, whose jazz-infused songs are heard throughout the film, Le bonheur c'est un rien Danielle Darrieux YouTube (2:56), like a ringing reminder of more innocent times and how quickly it was all forgotten, as the decade began with the Great Depression and ended on the brink of global war.  While the women are out, however, Inspector Brun sneaks back inside their apartment searching for evidence, finding a revolver that could end up being the murder weapon.  Earlier, a weary and emotionally despondent Madeleine feigned suicide with that same gun, “I’m a bad actress, you’re a bad lawyer, no one loves us.  Let’s be sensible and kill ourselves,” only to be deterred by Pauline, “No, it’s a beautiful day, and I have sandwiches.”  The overly biased investigating judge, Gustave Rabusset, an over-the-top Fabrice Luchini, the bewildered schoolmaster in Ozon’s In the House (Dans La Maison) (2012), is quickly convinced of Madeleine's guilt, based entirely on speculation, like a shot in the dark where he’s literally connecting the dots hoping it actually leads to something.  Madeleine claims she rebuffed his unwanted sexual advances, finding him lecherously vile and pathetic, but fled when he tried to sexually assault her, and left while he was very much alive, and is about to denounce the judge’s theory, but Pauline holds her back, with the judge acknowledging that if she can plead self-defense, she may not be found guilty, as France has a history of leniency in “crimes of passion.”  The fact that she didn’t commit the crime feels irrelevant, as Pauline springs into action, suddenly finding herself a case, deciding to make the trial a symbol of male oppression and abuse of women, which quickly makes sensational headlines as a cause célėbre.  In a world where reality and fiction merge, it’s impossible not to see parallels to today’s scandal and social media-obsessed world, with people willing to do anything to become famous.  Madeleine gives the performance of a lifetime posing as a wronged woman protecting her virtue, with rehearsed lines and carefully selected costumes, where Pauline’s closing argument ends in a rousing feminist speech exposing the hypocrisy of French male society to the delight of the courtroom audience and the media, as Madeleine is acquitted and immediately becomes a major film and stage star, while Pauline’s career as a lawyer takes off and the two women move to a luxurious house in Neuilly.  Using theater as an existential metaphor, the film is about the duplicity of words and the endless motives of an action, with Ozon never forgetting that women, using femininity as a weapon or tool, can be formidable manipulators to satisfy their lofty ambitions, where achieving justice can be achieved through means that aren’t necessarily based on fairness or truth, often resorting to a hall of mirrors and camouflages. 

A satiric comedy about misogyny and the abuse of power, the film is essentially an exploration of the dynamics of power and the complicated status of women, continuing themes explored in Ozon’s Peter von Kant (2022), a gender reversal re-interpretation of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant) (1972).  Ozon adroitly frames anti-feminist positions in sophisticated settings, where all the male characters are fools, either deluded or ridiculously pompous, while poking holes at a corrupt judicial system, as the female characters shine in triumph, like voices of liberation.  Playfully mixing together elements of theater and film, with opulent sets and smart staging, the film is a battle of wits, flaunting a biting feminist edge and campy humor, suggesting violence was often the only way women had to evade sexual harassment, reminding viewers that women in France did not have the right to vote until the postwar elections of 1945, could not marry freely, or even have their own checking account, where the road to success lay in the traditional role of marriage or in being someone’s mistress, an option these women abhor.  Just as the film begins to luxuriate in its rags-to-riches success story, Ozon introduces his most deviously wacky character in the form of scene-stealing Isabelle Huppert as eccentric silent film star Odette Chaumette, arriving in a flurry of chaos, draped in furs and feathers, with wonderfully absurd flaming orange hair that resembles a Toulouse-Lautrec poster.  All remember her former glory, like an homage to famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt, still dressed in turn-of-the-century theater attire, but she’s disappeared from public prominence, and now returns with a vengeance, claiming she’s the real murderer, and that these women have stolen her thunder, manipulating the headlines into successful careers, demanding recompense or she’ll spill the beans, exposing them as frauds while displaying a penchant for blackmail, ridiculously declaring with utmost sincerity, “The crime is mine!”  An over-the-top screwball comedy that plays fast and loose with the facts, the theatricality of the original play has taut, witty lines, accentuated by rapid-fire dialogue and dizzying flashbacks that feel more imaginary than real, with Ozon playfully adding contemporary themes.  At the end of the film, Madeleine and Odette combine forces to star in a play recreating the crime we did not see at the beginning, thumbing their noses at rampant sexism, mercilessly mocking entrenched bourgeois manners, accentuated by the acidic realism of black and white newsreel clips of famous female criminals of the 30’s, like the infamous Papin case, Christine and Léa Papin, the story of two sisters thought to have had incestuous relations.  Employed as maids, subject to written detailed instructions demanding perfection that would pass the “white glove test,” they killed their employer and her daughter in a particularly brutal manner, gouging the mother’s eyes and mutilating their bodies with a kitchen knife, the source material of Jean Genet’s The Maids, with many identifying the crime as a symbol for class struggle, also Violette Nozière (murderer), a French woman who accused her father of sexually abusing her, but was convicted of murdering her father, poisoning her parents with barbiturates, but her mother miraculously survived.  These gruesome events punctuate the otherwise richly colored action, as do references to the music and popular film culture of the 1930’s.  Huppert, by the way, played Violette Noziėre in Claude Chabrol’s screen adaptation VIOLETTE (1978), winning the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, so her presence is no mere coincidence, while Luchini also had a small role in that film.  With lavish period costumes and art deco sets, the lush scale of the film is much more extravagant than typically minimalist Ozon films, with a dazzling medley of images and sounds, where it’s clear they had a riot making this film, with Ozon back to his mischievous ways.