“Two Pianos” Turns Modern Melodrama Old-Fashioned

The cruellest legacy of the cinema is the silence it was born with. It took decades—until 1927—for the movies to find their voice, by which point even the best filmmakers seemed to have forgotten that they, or their characters, had anything to say. This was convenient, because by the time sound came around Hollywood’s producer-controlled studio system had just been consolidated, and loose talk would have ended up on the cutting-room floor. Then the Hays Code, along with standard-issue censorship, helped keep the lid tight. Even as characters onscreen talked volubly, even garrulously, the limitations on what they could say were narrow. The result was that, unlike novels and plays, movies became more or less synonymous with bowdlerizations so ingrained and so drastic that even most ostensible masterworks of realism come off like Candyland to viewers unindoctrinated by studio standards. Still, the enduring effect of this virtual silencing is bitterly paradoxical: it’s the grain of sand around which a glorious aesthetic has been elaborated. Hermetically sealed stories may also be fruitfully streamlined, stripping characters down to a handful of traits that, in the absence of digressions and interjections, focus attention on psychological consistency; self-censorship can yield varieties of allusive subtlety. The better a student of classic Hollywood a director is, the likelier it is that she can adopt its restrictive norms as the forms and styles of well-made movies—of art. More interesting than movies that are industrially silenced, though, are those made by original filmmakers working relatively freely and personally, who’ve smoothed out and glazed over their artistry of their own accord.

So it is with “Two Pianos” and its director and co-writer, Arnaud Desplechin, one of the venerable filmmakers of modern France. Though he started his career in the early nineteen-nineties, and is now sixty-five years old, he nonetheless bears the enviable mark of eternal youth. His movies exude eagerness, energy, verve in storytelling, and unmitigated confidence in the emotional power of the cinema itself. But, because French cinephiles have done a better job of studying and absorbing the styles of classic Hollywood (not least because of the legacy of French critics of the nineteen-forties and fifties who were pioneers in recognizing Hollywood directors as artists), they’ve also done too good a job of perpetuating, in modern guises, the same constraints that filmmakers of earlier generations endured.

“Two Pianos” is a melodrama that’s gleefully constructed around melancholy passions. Mathias Vogler (François Civil) is a still youthful concert pianist who, after years of teaching in Japan, returns to his native Lyon, in central France, having been summoned back by his longtime mentor, Elena Auden (Charlotte Rampling), a celebrated older pianist. Elena wants him to perform with her in a concert for two pianos and orchestra, and his homecoming is news in the local music scene, which he departed years ago, on the verge of a significant career as a soloist. The very night of his arrival, he comes face to face with Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a long-ago girlfriend, an art historian, who spurned him for his best friend, Pierre Solal (Jeremy Lewin), a gallerist whom she went on to marry. The breakup with Claude is why Mathias left Lyon and radically changed his life, and their encounter brings his romantic agony rushing back. He drinks like a fool and acts like a jerk. When he lands in jail, his agent, the worldly-wise Max (Hippolyte Girardot), gets him out, sees that he attends rehearsals with Elena, and tempts him with offers of gigs.