Deux pianos

French pianist Mathias Vogler returns to his native Lyon after a long time away: guided by his lifelong mentor he prepares to play in a series of concerts. An unexpected meeting in the Tete d’Or park with a boy who looks just like him, will shake Mathias’ certainties and lead him back to Claude, the woman he loved in his youth.

COMMENTARY
Interweaving music and memories, and making of the lead character’s return a meditation on time and identity, Desplechin further burnishes his reputation as one of the greatest living filmmakers, able to find a miraculous poetic balance between words and silence; the intimacy of feelings and inner torment; desire and regret. He delicately handles and sensitively portrays his characters’ many contradictions.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
This film was conceived in the summer, when two narrative threads wove together in my imagination. On the one hand, Kamen Velkovsky told me the story of a pianist who found his doppelganger in a child: almost like a German fairy tale, something mysterious. On the other hand, I myself was outlining the story of an impossible love, a tribute to Love Affair by Leo McCarey, a 1939 film. For a while, that was the name of the project, An Affair, recalling the original title of McCarey’s great melodrama. My actors liked the title; later, it rightly became Deux pianos… We think of the two lovers, the pianists, and even the two rivers that flow silently across Lyon.