‘Two Pianos’ review: Arnaud Desplechin drama features a virtuoso performance from Charlotte Rampling

Dir. Arnaud Desplechin. France. 2025. 115mins

The title is likely to be Two Pianos, however the emotional register is on the total orchestral stage within the newest from French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin, a few French live performance pianist re-encountering his past love. A yr after his cinephile docudrama-memoir Filmlovers!, he returns with a characteristically rhapsodic piece about love, dying, music and reminiscence, with simply the occasional glimmer of the uncanny. The place he has typically waxed autobiographical, right here he ventures into seemingly much less private territory however with unmistakeable thrives of his signature bravura fashion, placing music as ever to the expressive fore.

As with musical scores, it’s all within the efficiency

One expects each cerebral whimsy and hothouse emotiveness from Desplechin however, whereas the components has typically labored properly internationally, this drama is more likely to have much less widespread enchantment, starring because it does two actors who symbolize French cinema’s new technology however imply much less overseas. The profiles of François Civil and Nadia Tereszkiewicz, along with Desplechin’s personal, ought to earn Two Pianos stable bravos when it opens in France on October 15, following bows in Toronto and San Sebastian. Elsewhere will probably be right down to a sometimes commanding Charlotte Rampling to extend the worldwide enchantment of a movie that will probably be seen as area of interest in a really Gallic, reasonably rarefied manner. 

Set in Lyon, the movie begins with an intimate second between a younger married couple, Pierre (Jeremy Lewin) and Claude (Tereszkiewicz), with him telling her a wry Jewish anecdote – to which she promptly replies, “You wished to desert me?” That’s the sort of hot-wired emotional frequency at which individuals vibrate on this movie, together with pianist Mathias Vogler (Civil).

He’s first seen jetting again to Lyon from Japan, the place he has been having fun with a solo live performance profession; he’s returning on the behest of his mentor, piano doyenne Elena (Rampling), who’s quickly to retire. Mathias is a superb musician, however neurotic, self-destructive and with a ingesting drawback – and one night, spontaneously faints on seeing Claude. He additionally develops what appears a morbid obsession with a younger boy he spots, apparently an uncanny useless ringer of Mathias as a baby – though the reason for the movie’s streak of the incredible proves to be all too mundane.

To Elena’s scathing disapproval, Mathias embarks on a wilful course of screwing up his profession and his private life. On this sense, the movie resembles a reverse picture of Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Coronary heart Skipped: there a hoodlum dreamed of changing into a live performance pianist, right here a virtuoso appears set on retraining as an also-ran. Two Pianos ultimately settles into being a dysfunctional love story, with Mathias and Claude mooching over long-unfinished enterprise, and Mathias additionally getting concerned with Pierre’s youthful sister Judith (Alba Gaïa Bellugi).

Lending testy emotional help within the background is Mathias’s long-serving (and -suffering) agent; a witty characterisation from Hippolyte Girardot, injecting much-needed humour in a bluff, manic mode that implies a Gallic-style Falstaff (albeit skinnier). 

In any other case, it’s Rampling who dominates, exuding sternness, steeliness, mischief and ultimately fragility as a lady who has devoted her life to music and is starting to really feel her colleges abandoning her. Rampling isn’t the simplest performer with whom to compete, however Civil is undoubtedly at an obstacle. Now a critical box-office title in France following the 2023 Three Musketeers diptych, and a César Finest Actor nominee for Gilles Lellouche’s Beating Hearts, he hardly ever comes throughout right here as a lot deeper than a mutedly agonised hunk – though he tasks a studiousness and modesty. He’s definitely out-performed by Teresziewicz (spectacular in François Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine) though Claude’s mercurial character by no means fairly persuades, as she veers between fortissimo anguish and enigmatic flirtation. 

In typical Desplechin fashion, the fabric can really feel slight though, as with musical scores, it’s all within the efficiency – which incorporates the cinematography. Paul Guilhaume’s digital camera is usually nonetheless, generally free-floating, generally doing barely explicable issues like peering at characters by means of a door’s decorative ironwork. That is certainly the sort of Desplechin movie wherein something can occur – together with a personality dying with out warning.

Right here, nevertheless, his bravura conducting of comparatively typical melodrama materials doesn’t have an effect on us as a lot as his greatest earlier works. In any case, it’s the precise music that usually does the heavy lifting right here – with alternatives from Chopin, Bartok and Bruch, to not point out Grégoire Hetzel’s rating, spiralling saxophone capturing the vertiginous register of the entire affair.