Review: Two of Us Undercuts Its Romance with Quasi-Thriller Elements

The film unfortunately sidelines the chemistry between its stars once it’s time for the characters to bypass one obstacle after another.

Two of Us
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Filippo Meneghetti’s Two of Us begins as a tender romantic drama about two sexagenarian women living across the way from one another in the same Paris apartment building only to swiftly devolve into a single-minded quasi-thriller. Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) are lovers, and the recent death of the latter’s husband provides them with the opportunity to, at long last, express their love in the open. But Mado, as Madeleine is nicknamed, remains reluctant to come out to her children, and when she unexpectedly suffers a stroke, the couple’s plans (including a move to Rome) are sidelined and Nina must figure out a way of reclaiming her lover, now under 24/7 care and unable to speak, without revealing the truth of their relationship to Mado’s family.

This plot turn does a disservice to Chevallier and Sukowa’s warm, touching chemistry, as the film is now given over Nina dodging an hour’s worth of obstacles. Meneghetti seems to have more compassion for these characters than his writing sometimes evinces, having Nina and Mado endure one ordeal after another and too often defining their relationship as a love beset by bigotry or intolerance from all sides. After a while, there’s a sense that Meneghetti is unwilling to afford any of the film’s secondary characters, from Mado’s daughter (Léa Drucker) to her live-in caregiver (Muriel Bénazéraf), any leniency; it’s Mado and Nina against the entire world, a tiresome trope in queer cinema that feels as if it’s long past its sell-by date.

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Once Mado suffers her stroke and is more or less incapacitated for the remainder of the narrative, Two of Us becomes something akin to a small-scale heist flick, with Mado as the stolen treasure that her desperate lover seeks to recover. By contrasting light and shadow, noise and silence, the filmmakers craft a tense atmosphere that matches the emotional timbre of the film’s scenes. Early close-ups emphasize the sweetness of Mado and Nina’s relationship, and a scene where Nina sneaks past Mado’s carer early one morning is fraught with tension and understated poignancy, while a later one set to Petula Clark’s “Sul Mio Carro” is exhilarating in spite of its predictability. The contrasting designs for the two women’s apartments, each a mirror of the other’s layout (Mado’s is richly decorated and homey, while Nina’s is functional and almost disturbingly barren), are also striking and evocative.

Which is to say that Two of Us is handsomely mounted, but it’s so committed to summoning as many standard thriller, and thriller-adjacent, elements as possible that it mostly succeeds at undercutting the depiction of Nina and Mado’s romance. Separating lovers in the prime of their passion is a tried-and-tested means of eliciting our yearning for a reunion, but here it all feels overly simplistic and ultimately incredulous, and after a while you may be forgiven for thinking that the characters we come to care about are being used, not unlike the audience.

Score: 
 Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Martine Chevallier, Léa Drucker, Muriel Benazeraf, Jérôme Varanfrain  Director: Filippo Meneghetti  Screenwriter: Filippo Meneghetti, Malysone Bovorasmy  Distributor: Magnolia Pictures  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Paddy Mulholland

Paddy Mulholland's writing has appeared in Spectrum Culture, desistfilm, and Awards Watch.

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