Mathias is handsome, he has a lot of charm and even more talent. He is also egocentric, arrogant, childish, self-destructive, manipulative, weak-willed. Not really surprising: among the many paths that Arnaud Desplechin’s cinema has ventured for thirty-five years is the recurring hypothesis of an unsympathetic main character.
“Unsympathetic”, in the sense of possessing a behavior not a priori likely to inspire support or goodwill from spectators. This choice, which opens up multiple and exciting perspectives in terms of narration and moral questioning, was until now enriched by what inspires the interpreter of these characters. Mathieu Amalric most often, from How I argued… (1996) Ghosts of Ishmael (2017), then Melvil Poupaud in Sibling (2022), have in common that they inspire immediate sympathy.
This phenomenon was part of the immense richness of the proposals of the feature films of the author of Kings and queen (2004). Alive, disturbing, uncertain, this set of questions is renewed in a singular way with the arrival of François Civil in the main role of Two pianos.
Mathias, therefore, a virtuoso pianist returning from a long expatriation in Japan to accompany the last concert of Elena (Charlotte Rampling), who was the protective, demanding and clairvoyant guide of his career. By chance, he meets again the woman who was his great love, Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who was also the wife of his best friend, Pierre. She is now the mother of a child, Simon, who looks a lot like Mathias at the same age.
The “two pianos” of the title are the dialogues, verbal or not, all in harmony and ruptures, which the two musicians, Mathias and Elena, must play on stage, but also those between Mathias and the recrossed woman, between him and the uncovered child. And even, in half-tone, what circulates and is not shared between the two “mothers” of this boy who is no longer a son, uncertain of being a father – the biological mother (Anne Kessler) and Elena (Charlotte Rampling), the spiritual mother.
The vibrant intelligence of narrative constructions, including an element of romance, even fantasy, asserted in a playful and serious manner, is always there in the filmmaker of The Sentinel (1992) and Three memories from my youth (2015). The narrative material of Two pianos is a treasure. However, something is wrong, which is difficult to understand and painful to try to explain when we continue to intensely love the cinema of Arnaud Desplechin.
The triangle riddle
The too simple answer would be to refer to the repetition of the motifs encountered in his previous films, a repetition which concerns both the narrative and emotional springs as well as pure directorial gestures.
So, yes, the sudden fall of Mathias when Claude appears gives rise, among other collapses, to the much stronger memory of Henri (Mathieu Amalric), falling like a dead tree on a sidewalk ofA Christmas story (2008). Yes, the irruption of Mathias into a funeral ceremony recalls without equaling the calamitous appearance of Marion Cotillard in a family funeral, at the beginning of Brother and sister.
And the affectionate and tightrope walk of reciprocal discovery of an adult and a child in Two pianos cannot compete with the enchantment of the visit to the Museum of the Man of Ismaël (Mathieu A., always) and Elias at the end of Kings and queen. Etc.
However, those who accompany the work of the Roubaisian filmmaker have long known what moving and laughing resources he, more than anyone, can bring to light from these revivals of visual and emotional motifs, as well as from the revisitation of the themes evoked.
If, this time, the variations still seem to be behind the previous ones, we see little other explanation than interpretation. Unstable ground, which cannot be strengthened by simply finding the main actor “less good”. François Civil is a good actor, that’s not the question. And the same goes for his partner, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, to whom there is nothing to reproach.
Nor can it be a question of attributing this discrepancy to the fact that François Civil gained recognition in the context of a cinema very different from that associated with Arnaud Desplechin. The pure marvel of Roschdy Zem’s interpretation in
Roubaix, a light (2019) and Marion Cotillard in two films is enough to ruin this explanation.
What then? We don’t know. What Elena says about the act of musical interpretation, its absolute requirement, its fragility, its character both indefinable and implacable, applies to interpretation on screen. But it’s not enough. At the piano, when playing, there are only two of them, the pianist and the piece of music. In a film, especially a film by an author like Arnaud Desplechin, the question cannot be reduced to the relationship between the actor and his role. It is necessarily activated in a triangle, the third vertex of which is the filmmaker.
Desplechin’s cinema has often been accused of narcissism. An unfair and stupid accusation, when – in the gap between what could come from his own story and the embodied, physical, inhabited presence of these double beings, inseparably fictional characters and real bodies, real voices, real gestures of those interpreting them – immense spaces opened up for us, these spectators to whom he dedicated his previous film (Spectators!2024).
Who will play what (what music, what role “in life”, what way of presenting themselves in their own eyes and in those of others)? Who is whose child and in what capacity? Who betrayed whom and according to what criteria? What choices to exist, today and tomorrow? The questions live in the scenario of Two pianosin words, in the lights of Lyon’s streets and large apartments.
Two accomplices with the precision of poet-surgeons, Charlotte Rampling and Hippolyte Girardot, display prodigies of tact, humor and lucidity. This is a lot, quite enough to maintain the certainty that the arrival of a new film by Arnaud Desplechin is an important moment, that it is legitimate to await with relish. And that’s not enough.
Between Mathias, François Civil and Arnaud Desplechin, between Claude, Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Arnaud Desplechin, something did not emerge, nor shine. At the end of Two pianos there is the possibility of starting to play a piece other than the one planned. We can only hope so for the next film.
