, is the next great French film actress, and her emotional febrility makes her a\u00a0good fit for the cinema of Arnaud Desplechin, who instructs his actors to deliver their lines with feelings that don\u2019t match the words, the better to capture the moody inconsistencies that govern their characters\u2019 chaotic and contradictory passions.<\/span><\/p>\nClaude,\u00a0Tereszkiewicz\u2019s character in Desplechin\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Two Pianos<\/i>, opens the film already stricken with half-concealed anxiety, flirting with her husband Pierre (Jeremy Lewin) and demanding he tell her a\u00a0story, as a\u00a0way of calming her down before a\u00a0party she doesn\u2019t want to go to. Perhaps she had a\u00a0premonition \u2013 in the elevator, she has an unexpected reunion with pianist Mathias (Fran\u00e7ois Civil), a\u00a0mutually 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 a\u00a0funeral over a\u00a0loved one\u2019s\u00a0grave.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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Mathias was once a\u00a0concert pianist of great promise, but left his and Claude\u2019s hometown of Lyon under a\u00a0cloud, 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 a\u00a0four-handed piece for her career-capping concert. Rampling, with a\u00a0tight-lipped severity around her mouth but regal mischief in her eyes, is ideally cast as an exacting virtuoso, and her demands on Mathias\u2019 buried genius are one major chord in the film, harmonized with one on the resumption of the history he left Lyon without resolving\u00a0\u2013 a\u00a0history that returns with a\u00a0vengeance in the person of a\u00a0boy, glimpsed on a\u00a0local playground, who looks just like him at the same\u00a0age.<\/span><\/p>\nInitially a\u00a0magic-realist flourish, the boy\u2019s resemblance to Mathias actually has a\u00a0logical explanation \u2013 a\u00a0very logical one, in fact. Though the script, by Desplechin and Kamen Velkovsky, begins with a\u00a0flurry of coincidences \u2013 a\u00a0folk story retold in the film\u2019s first few minutes, about an eerie moment of psychic connection between a\u00a0physically separated husband and wife, foreshadows a\u00a0cut later cut from a\u00a0piano chord to a\u00a0sudden heart attack, as if the former had triggered the latter \u2013 the film sees Desplechin in a\u00a0well-behaved mode. Rare for his filmography, the narrative has clear stakes: Will Mathias stay in Lyon, giving up his vocation for a\u00a0chance to rewrite his past, or will he move on, honoring his gift and burying his old self? This could be a\u00a0Cameron Crowe movie, with the caveat that Crowe would probably be less casual about infidelity.<\/span><\/p>\nDesplechin indulges in a\u00a0few of his trademark stylistic and storytelling tics \u2013 jump cuts and an iris effect; a\u00a0letter read aloud by its writer, direct to camera and a\u00a0blurt of painful-looking slapstick against the grain of the scene \u2013 but only sparingly. His suave and responsive filmmaking, characterized here by Paul Guilhaume\u2019s light-sensitive and fine-grained cinematography, usually works as a\u00a0suave smile to belie the bitter ambivalence of his drama, but\u00a0<\/span>Two Pianos<\/i> simply goes down smooth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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