Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Command Performance:
An Interview with Arnaud Desplechin
By Jawni Han

As ridiculous as it sounds to speak of a director responsible for My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument (1996), Esther Kahn (2000), and A Christmas Tale (2008) in this way, Arnaud Desplechin has become something of a marginalized figure in the U.S. in the past few years. For one, his last three films, Deception (2021), Brother and Sister (2022), and Filmlovers! (2024), failed to secure stateside distribution. In my own experience, I have encountered more cinephiles who regard him as a once-great filmmaker past his prime like Philippe Garrel than those who count him among such contemporary French cinema’s luminaries Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis, who made their feature debuts just a few years before Desplechin did. It is then especially heartening to see that his latest project Two Pianos is receiving a theatrical release in the U.S.

Two Pianos revolves around Mathias (François Civil), a renowned concert pianist who returns to his hometown of Lyon after an indeterminate period of self-imposed exile in Japan. Two women in his orbit are his musical mentor, Elena (Charlotte Rampling), and his old flame Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). On his way out from Elena’s party, the pianist faints upon sighting the latter. Years ago, Claude, married to Mathias’s best friend, Pierre, had a passionate extramarital affair with our protagonist; consumed by guilt and unresolved romantic regrets, he subsequently left the country and abandoned his illustrious career in music. Soon after his return, he finds himself mired in familiar interpersonal conflicts, which take on more urgency when Mathias discovers that Elena is about to retire and Claude’s son Simon is, in fact, his child. After Pierre’s sudden death from an automobile accident, Mathias rekindles the stormy affair, which prompts him to settle down in Nice against the mentor’s wish for him to resume his life as a globetrotting musician.

At a relatively brisk 115 minutes, Two Pianos is not as sprawling as some of his better-known ensemble pieces, and it does not go to incredible depths to reveal all the emotional and existential intricacies of its characters like Esther Kahn and My Golden Days (2015). However, it is an exquisite melodrama that further explores Desplechin’s pet motif of ghosts from the past haunting vulnerable characters who face impossible choices. Don’t make the mistake of taking its shorter runtime and seemingly reduced narrative scope for lesser artistic ambitions. The film seems Desplechin challenging himself in numerous ways: for instance, his idiosyncratic use of jump cuts produces completely different effects in the film’s first and second halves. He never went away, but Two Pianos feels like a triumphant return for Desplechin, a testament to his maturing style and the observable fact that he is still a filmmaker to be reckoned with.

I sat down with Desplechin at the Kino Lorber office in Manhattan during his most recent visit to New York, coinciding with the film’s U.S. premiere at the 2026 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. We spoke about his fascination with ghosts, the joys and challenges of working with musicians, and how Issey Miyake and Edward Yang served as inspirations for Two Pianos.

Reverse Shot: Since the movie revolves around music and the world of musicians, I was wondering if you grew up playing any instruments?

Arnaud Desplechin: Alas, no. It's one of the big regrets in my life. My companion loves and is quite aware of classical music. I'm not a specialist in any kind of music, you know. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to classical music, jazz, and hip-hop, whatever pop music or world music a lot. But my companion, she's quite [knowledgeable] about the classical music of the 20th century. So, she helped me quite a lot with that. It’s one of the wonderful things about cinema. It was a big regret for me not to be able to play any instrument, but I was making films. I met Grégoire Hetzel, who has composed the scores for most of my films. And Grégoire, when I'm working with him, allows me to correct him or make changes. Today I'm able to read sheet music written for the orchestra. So I read it. He plays it on the piano, and I say, “You change the horns, okay?” But I can't say which notes. I can sing them. And Gregoire, because we have such a friendship, takes my notes. When we worked with a jazz score, like with the saxophone and the piano, he allowed me to enter the booth with the musicians to direct them. I can't play any music, but I can direct real musicians.

RS: I imagine building scenes where actors playing musicians and real musicians work together comes with a unique set of challenges. What was that process like?

AD: I’ve attended so many music recording sessions in London and Paris. That's something that I do know. I know where to put the camera behind the orchestra. With [cinematographer] Paul Guillaume, I was trying to find a way to tell stories [through the musical performances]. Because actually, in most films, you have a scene where you can see musicians, and that’s implied in the storytelling. It's a moment where nothing happens. But let's take the first scene when you have music for two pianos. [Before the scene], Mathias gets drunk. He is in jail after that. He’s just hanging out in the garden, seeing his body double with the face of a child. He arrives. He is still hungover, but now he has to play. He plays like shit, and Elena is pissed at him. So it’s about the action, not the music. It’s about the relationship between the two characters, between Elena and Mathias. So, each one of the musical scenes leads to the final one—the audition. Will he win the contest? Will he lose it? Will he play better?

As for mixing actors with musicians, it was easy because Charlotte Rampling knows everything about classical music. When I met her, she said, “Okay, I won't play one note because I know that I'm not a musician.” So, I asked, “Could you play one note of the Debussy?” “Okay, I will play the opening note of the Debussy.” It was lovely. But François Civil can't read music, unlike Charlotte. So, he memorized all the positions and practiced for a long, long time before we directed him with Gregoire to have the right interpretation of these moments. We would tell him, “No, no, you don't play these notes like that, try it like this instead.” When we were working on the last audition scene, when he is supposed to play Chopin’s étude, I saw François plotting something behind my back with the sound recordist. And I found out he told the sound recordist to put a mic in the piano, because it could be useful to me. When we had met months before, François arrived at our meeting and said, “I love the script, and by the way, I can’t play the piano.” I said, “Who gives a shit?” What I'm interested in are the feelings of Mathias—why he is so passive in front of this woman he loves and his strange relationship with Elena, who is like his mother.

RS: A couple of words that often get used to describe your film are “sprawling” and “novelistic.” And when I first saw Two Pianos, I thought I was going to learn more about Mathias’s life outside of Lyon, but we barely do. Was there a reason for that?

AD: There is a wonderful thing that I didn't unfortunately come up with, but François said it. One time, we were presenting the film in France, and there was a question from the audience, and it had to do with how Mathias faints in front of Claude early in the film. “So is the film just a dream and nothing happened?” That was the question. And François said the answer was the opposite. At last, Mathias is waking up when he sees the beloved, when he sees Claude. All his life in Japan, he was asleep, and now he's awake. And during the film, he would be awake. It was not a proper life in Japan—that was just a dream. But now that he can see her, and when he faints and bangs his forehead against the door, he wakes up. I thought that was a beautiful way to put it.

RS: Over the course of the film, Elena’s response to her impending retirement is expressed through her outfits. First, we see her in a striking red suit. And the second time we see her during a rehearsal—it’s one of my favorite shots from the film—she's wearing this beautiful Issey Miyake top. When you wear Miyake’s clothes, the micro-pleats don't conform to the body. They create these unruly bumps, almost to protect the body. And towards the end, her sadness becomes all the more startling precisely because she is standing in a shower booth, completely naked and vulnerable. Without the armor, the stage, and the music, she doesn't have much left in her life.

AD: I love your way of describing the costume evolution of Elena. The fact that she's always wearing armor. I noticed that many spectators were afraid of Elena. But I think she's fun. She's frightening and funny when she says she had a dog once but sold it after three months. She lights a cigarette and insists that you smoke with her too. She's so insolent and brutal. I love her for that.

RS: There seems to be this tension between life outside of art and the total devotion to art.

AD: Is art compatible with life or not? Well, actually, there are two films here. Mathias is balancing between two women and is in love with both. I remember telling François before the shoot that some people who read the script found the male character to be passive. I responded by quoting Ian Holm from Esther Kahn—an actor is doing actions. So, I said to François, “If you were to become Mathias, you would still have to act something even when you’re passive in the scene descriptions. So how will you sort out this contradiction?” He said that he’s been through love and knows all about it. At each step, Mathias chooses to obey love and Claude’s orders and chooses Elena as his mentor. In both cases, he’s taking an action.

The first section is the love story with Elena. Although they don’t go to bed together, there’s still intimacy. She’s with a lovely blonde girl, who is sitting beside her and caressing her thigh, and the girl leaves the room when Mathias shows up. Elena’s glance seems to tell him, “Not this one, this one is for me.” So, you can imagine that in the past, they might have been playing games like this. Definitely something sexy between the two. Then the second part of the film, after Pierre’s death, is of course the love story with Claude. What’s funny is that at one point, Claude is jealous of Elena and calls her “the skinny bitch.” It’s true that Elena wins Mathias’s heart in the end. He leaves Claude for Italy to do what Elena wants him to do. A competition between the two women who have been loved by Mathias.

RS: I noticed that there are jump cuts/abrupt cuts throughout the film. You mentioned the scene where Elena asks Mathias to smoke with her, and there is a jump cut there. Almost like the film is snapping, because Elena is very frustrated and angry. But when I see the same technique used in a scene between Mathias and Claude in a park, it doesn’t feel like the film is fracturing. On the contrary, it feels like you're conjoining these fragments from the past in the present moment.

AD: The two actors were actually surprised when they ran lines. They initially thought the scene was going to be one continuous moment. But I told them, “No, let’s start by the tree. And after that, let’s have this second section on the bench.” All of a sudden, it became an endless moment. You know, I’ve seen some films in my life, and I remember the films I love and learn from them. The problem is, what do I do with the fact that I cannot steal from these films that I worship? There is a scene toward the end of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi—a masterpiece—which breaks my heart. [NJ and Sherry] are in the park, and they get to relive their past love, an impossible love. And that was my inspiration. I hope I didn’t take the same path that Edward Yang took because he’s the master and I’m just his student.

RS: Had you previously wanted to make a film about musicians?

AD: I wanted to work with an old friend and a new writer whose name is Kamen Velkovsky, and it was great. He does not live in France, so we had Zoom sessions. One day, Kamen asked, “Okay, Arnaud, we’ll try to write something together. Tell me what you have.” And my answer was, “I’m thinking about this young widow. She’s too young. And this guy Pierre just passed away [clicks his fingers] like that. Then, it’s a Jewish funeral and she’s a Gentile woman. The widow makes a speech and recounts a joke from her husband, saying he was a wonderful storyteller. It’s an obscene joke, very embarrassing for everyone at the funeral. Suddenly, she feels so alone and stupid. This is what I want to film, this funeral. I want to film this joke, which I think is funny, but not funny in this particular context. I want to save her from the embarrassment I will plunge her into. I will try to save her, to rescue her after a while. This is what I have. What do you have, Kamen?”

And Kamen told me, “I have a different story. It’s about a pianist coming from exile, arriving in his hometown. He’s hungover at a park, and he sees his double with the face of a child. That’s it, it’s him as a child.” It was a ghost story, and I love ghosts. So, the film became a marriage between these two stories. One story about impossible love, and one story about ghosts. Once we began writing, the ghosts started to appear everywhere in the script, mainly the ghosts of Pierre. There’s also the ghost of Elena’s disease. The ghosts were providing a mystery element to the love story, kind of like German mystery tales from the late 19th century—there’s me and this child, but is the child actually me?

The story became quite mysterious. Then, I asked Kamen, “But how come? How will you fix that story? I have this widow at the park with the child. And I have this other guy. How do we put these two stories together?” And he said, “Yes, but it’s the pianist’s child.” So, that’s how we wrote it.

RS: Simon is obviously a real child, but he’s also a ghost from Mathias’s own past that he doesn't quite remember. For instance, he doesn’t remember why he gave up on the violin at first. But through the child, he recalls that part of his childhood. That might be quite comforting, but contending with the lost past can be intimidating. Did you intend to convey something frightening about Mathias’s encounters with Simon?

AD: Frightening, certainly like in German ghost stories written by Hoffmann or other writers like him. We learn at the swimming pool that Mathias lost his father around Simon’s age. To be a classical musician as a young child is nightmarish. You basically have no childhood. Mathias never had a real childhood because he was constantly practicing. So, to him, looking at Simon is looking at the childhood he never experienced.

When Mathias sees the child for the second time, Simon throws stones at him with absolute hate. And that’s exactly what I wanted to film. I was terrified after that, back in my hotel room. Then, I thought to myself, how can I share with an audience an image so upsetting and uncomfortable? Mathias is struck by fear and can’t cope with it. He has to tame the kid by having discussions with him, trying to adapt to each other’s ways. In some ways, Simon has to adopt Mathias, and Mathias has to adopt Simon.