‘Two Pianos’ San Sebastian Review: Desplechin Strikes a Chord Between Mystery and Melodrama

It may not be one of the major works in the celebrated career of inventive and prolific French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin, but Two Pianos has the complexity, mystery, and ambiguity of his best films. What begins as a story that seems to drift into the almost fantastical gradually evolves—eloquently and dramatically—into a more traditional family drama. The film isn’t free of narrative problems—by now a familiar trait in the cinema of the Kings and Queen director—but it observes its protagonists with both generosity and complexity.

From the outset, there’s a Hitchcockian aura of mystery. Mathias (François Civil) is a pianist returning from Japan to his hometown of Lyon to give a series of concerts alongside Elena, a famous veteran pianist played by Charlotte Rampling, who brings her usual blend of steely rigor and humanity. Elena has long been Mathias’s mentor, and she sees him as her protégé. But during rehearsals, it becomes clear that both are facing personal crises.

Elena’s struggle is more straightforward: she feels her age, complains of fading memory, and is ready to retire from music. Mathias’s turmoil is harder to grasp. On the street, he notices a young boy who later suffers an accident. He begins to follow him obsessively, to the point of seeming like a predator lurking in the park with sinister intentions. But that isn’t the case, and soon we learn what drives him to the kid. Another encounter sets things in motion: Mathias meets Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and upon seeing her for the first time, he faints instantly.

Earlier, we’d seen Claude with her partner (Jeremy Lewin) in a subplot that now connects to the main narrative. From this moment on, Mathias’s life unravels: he drinks heavily, arrives drunk to rehearsals, sinks into grief, and loses his bearings. The second half of the film is devoted to unraveling these mysteries and, as far as possible, finding ways to repair or contain them.

A refined drama set against the backdrop of classical music is more or less what audiences expect from a prestigious French production. But Desplechin always veers away from convention. While Two Pianos is not as radical or tonally daring as some of his earlier films, like My Golden Days, there’s always a playful formal edge that lifts the story out of the traditional framework of family drama.

Mathias doesn’t know what to do with his life, his music, or his future. Nor does he fully understand how to process what happened in his past. In this, he mirrors Claude. In the “competition” between plotlines, the relationship with Elena loses some weight, which weakens the somewhat overstretched final act. But despite certain repetitive or less effective scenes, Two Pianos never loses its center of gravity: the portrait of a tormented man who, at a turning point in his life, must learn to make peace with his own story.