“With its complexity, beauty, and emotional depth, Two Pianos stands as one of Desplechin’s most affecting works.”

Two Pianos, the latest film from master director Arnaud Desplechin, co-written with Kamen Velkovsky and premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, tells the story of Mathias Volger, a pianist returning from Japan to Lyon, played with depth and complexity by François Civil. Mathias has been invited to perform a series of concerts with his former teacher and mentor Elena, and while at first the film seems a simple story of yet another artist confronting his past, Desplechin’s cinema is always deeply complex. What appears straightforward becomes an intricate and richly nuanced meditation on parallel lives, symbolized by two pianos: how lives move in opposite directions, how choices branch into crossroads, and how even the most seemingly ordinary decisions can be tremendously important.

François Civil delivers perhaps the finest performance of his career. With his square chiseled jaw and boy-band hair reminiscent of the early 2000s, Civil radiates sheer beauty and screen charisma. But beyond this charm he is able to reveal sorrow, grief, confusion, and warmth, which are contradictions of a former child prodigy now forced to make difficult decisions about his career, his relationships, and his sense of self. Civil has worked with French veterans such as Cédric Klapisch, but it is under Desplechin’s layered storytelling that he finds something richer, inhabiting a character caught between paths with remarkable vulnerability.

Alongside him is Charlotte Rampling as Elena, his former teacher. At first it may feel unusual to see Rampling embody a concert pianist, but she brings fierce passion and sharpness to the role of a retiring musician unwilling to compromise. She is exacting, forceful, and disappointed, but also loving; she’s the kind of mentor who shapes as much as she wounds. Her scenes with Civil crackle, not only in the rehearsal hall but in moments of confrontation, when his past and future choices re-emerge.  

The ensemble is equally strong. Nadia Tereszkiewicz is luminous and complex as Claude, Mathias’ ex-lover, navigating grief after the sudden death of her husband Pierre (Jérémy Lewin). Desplechin regular Hippolyte Girardot appears as Max, Mathias’ agent, a friend and figure who has long steered him and guided him. Notably Valentin Picard plays Simon, Claude’s young son, and he delivers a great child performance that is essential to the film.  Mathias, seeing Simon at the playground, recognizes something uncannily similar in the boy’s resemblance to himself as a child. It is this revelation that guides the film as it ties past, present, and possible future into one moment.

At first it seems that Two Pianos will center on the relationship between Mathias and Elena, but the screenplay, profoundly structured, reveals itself as a double movement: not only the story of Mathias returning to Lyon, but also the story between Mathias, Claude, and Simon. Claude’s grief becomes entangled with Mathias’ own sorrow, and their rekindled passion forces Mathias into questions he has long avoided. 

“You haven’t yet started living,” Elena tells him. But what does it mean? For much of his life Mathias has been guided, or controlled, by others. Elena shaped him, demanded of him, but remains disappointed. Max steered his career but left him dependent. Claude shaped his youth with love and now, widowed, seeks new life and a potential new relationship with him. And in Simon, Mathias sees not only resemblance but responsibility as a mirror of his past and a possible vision of his future.

Desplechin writes his characters with great complexity. Elena is not only controlling but also vulnerable.  Claude is not only rekindling her relationship with Mathias but also torn by her own grief and her love for her son. Mathias himself is not only indecisive but deeply human, a man afraid of choosing wrongly, afraid that every decision will make a monumental change in his life. This fullness is what makes Two Pianos affecting; the characters are flawed but always profoundly human.

The sorrow and grief of these characters is heightened by the music itself. The rehearsals and concerts serve both as narrative anchors and temporary respite, and also as moments of consolation. The sound of two pianos, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in dissonance, becomes the film’s structural metaphor. Music gives the characters relief and helps them endure their grief and suffering. It is an affirmation that music, even amid sorrow, carries restorative power.

At one point Max tells Mathias, “You’re young enough to change your life.” Mathias responds, “I’m old.” The exchange captures the heart of Two Pianos. It is not quite a coming-of-age story, nor is it quite a mid-life crisis film, though Civil at 35 plays between these. It is about the crossroads that many millennials in their 30s are facing today.  No longer young, not yet old, needing to make decisions about career, love, and family that feel permanent and perhaps terrifying.  Desplechin treats this with tenderness but also honesty, and the weight of choice and the fear of regret are essential themes in the film.

With its complexity, beauty, and emotional depth, Two Pianos stands as one of Desplechin’s most affecting works. It is a film about love, regret, art, and above all about life itself: the roads we take, the roads we abandon, and the roads to be travelled upon.