Mathias is staying with his mother, Anna (Anne Kessler), in the apartment where he grew up, and chance intervenes again: walking through a public park, he sees a young boy whom he considers his own childhood doppelgänger. Then, realizing that the child, named Simon (and played by Valentin Picard), is Claude’s, he becomes convinced he’s the father and tries to insinuate himself into Simon’s life—and into Claude’s. There are many more complications that tangle these relationships and bring the main characters’ past lives ever more sharply into the spotlight. What hangs in the balance is a triangle of interlocked possibilities—on one side, Mathias’s possible relationships with Claude and Simon, and on the other his artistic connection to Elena, who hopes to keep him in Lyon and reignite his concert career.
“Two Pianos” is built, above all, on a series of coincidences, which Desplechin has the wisdom—and the classical sensibility—to cloak with an inevitability that lends the story the force of destiny. The scene that brings Mathias and Claude together again is built from a devastatingly clever series of utterly unconnected circumstances—none sufficient, all necessary, and timed with the mechanical precision of screwball comedy. It’s only one of many such Rube Goldberg-esque turns of carefully constructed randomness, which quickly pile up with an oppressive inexorability that is bound up with Mathias’s return home—where else will the past surge back with the force of the tides?
The movie’s script is multilayered, with a bare framework that accumulates rich texture by way of moment-to-moment action and dialogue. (The end credits suggest where the layers come from: Desplechin wrote the story with Kamen Velkovsky, and then the two, together with Ondine Lauriot dit Prévost, adapted it into a screenplay, with the collaboration of Anne Berest.) There are micro-twists within the major ones, expressive fillips that blend confessions and aphorisms, and grand reflections along with jousts of seductive wit. When Mathias heads straight from the airport to a salon-like reception in honor of Elena, the tone of the event is set when a butler hands him a necktie to borrow. The scene’s dramatic import is packed with a heavy dose of backstory, as Elena reminisces about discovering Mathias’s precocious talent. She calls herself a monster for avoiding family life in favor of her music career, and she expects Mathias to be one, too—to take on the same burden of ruthless commitment. Yet, despite the film’s foregrounding of music, including with brief but alluring snippets of performance, the subject remains abstract. Elena and Mathias play Bartók and Bruch; Elena, in a planned solo recital, plays Debussy’s “Estampes,” but not before telling Mathias, “I hate Debussy,” a remark that ends the scene. Mathias never gets to ask why, and viewers never get to hear her answer.
Writing about “Michael” last week, I noted that the script, by John Logan, didn’t touch on the three fundamentals of money, sex, and politics, and, as a result, left its protagonist a cipher of musical talent and success. This wasn’t unexpected in a commercially engineered Hollywood blockbuster, but I was more surprised to find that “Two Pianos” is only one for three. There’s sex, in the most conventional way, pneumatic and perfunctory, merely to signify forensically that it has happened, with no distinctive action and no casual talk. Throughout the film, the conversation (and there’s plenty of it) serves either to nail down plot points and character traits—or, as in a few Jewish riffs, as ornamental as sprinkles, to suggest substance that’s never developed.
From the movie’s first scene, the calculated silences come off not merely as a failure of screenwriting but as an approach to cinematic form. In the living room of a casually posh apartment, Pierre has just got young Simon to sleep and comes out to where Claude, awaiting him, asks him to tell her a story. When he playfully but earnestly dispenses a tale, from Jewish folklore, of a prodigal son’s return, she sharply asks whether he’d wanted to abandon her. At that moment, Desplechin cuts to Mathias, studying a score on an airplane, ending the scene between Claude and Pierre just when it was just getting started. The rest of the film is filled with such stifling cuts, with scenes that dispense information without exploring it. Pierre’s Jewish identity is heavily emphasized through what Claude calls his endless stock of stories. But the irony of those stories’ ironies, the paradox of their paradoxes, is that, instead of evoking the significance of that heritage, they merely stand for it. Similarly, the direction—and its corollary, the editing—allows nothing extraneous to detract attention from the script’s meticulous and sturdy construction. Desplechin seems to burrow back down through the thickly applied matter of daily life, past the local Lyon sights and the heady milieu of classical music, to reach his bare framework again. The film’s over-all aesthetic of headlong elegance—of dramatically precise images, and carefully calibrated and sensitive performances that never let loose—thrusts the story’s thin but solid lines to the fore.
