FILM REVIEW
“Two of Us” Follows Closeted Lesbians
A secret romance generates its own kind of adversity
BY STEVE ERICKSON
The closet still makes for
great dramatic motivation.
After all, there are
only so many reasons
why lovers can’t live openly together.
Filippo Meneghetti’s “Two of Us”
sets up a relationship between two
elderly women who live next door
to each other in the same apartment
building. They fi nally plan to
move to Rome to live more openly,
but Madeleine (Martine Chevalier)
can’t work up the courage to
come out to her daughter Anne
(Léa Drucker), who believes Madeleine’s
late husband still remains
the great love of her life. It doesn’t
occur to the couple that the informality
of their arrangement
could be a danger to their ability
to continue it. One day, she has a
stroke. Her partner Nina (Martine
Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa in “Two of Us.”
Chevalier) has to fi ght with Anne
and hired caregiver Muriel (Muriel
Benazeraf) to remain the central
person in her life.
MAGNOLIA PICTURES
“Two of Us” plays with a sinister
claustrophobia. While not a horror
fi lm or thriller, it borrows images
and ideas from them. In an opening
scene which turns out to be
a dream, a young girl hangs out
in a park, becoming frightened
by the sound of screeching birds.
The apartment building is treated
like a character, and not a friendly
one. Repeatedly, the camera is positioned
to simulate the view from
an apartment peephole. The apartment
hallways are dingy and barely
lit. An air of menace pervades
them. One almost expects the
creepy twin girls from “The Shining”
to make a cameo appearance.
However, this is the place where
Nina and Madeleine have fallen
in love. Once their connection is
threatened, Nina fi ghts desperately
to cling to it, even though
Madeleine’s ability to understand
her immediately after the stroke
is questionable. The fi lm does not
idealize her. Some of her behavior
towards Muriel is appalling.
But even her worst depths convey
her passionate desire to stay with
Madeleine. Without getting didactic,
“Two of Us” shows the damage
caused by homophobia. Nina and
Madeleine have been together for
20 years without being open about
it. The shocked response of Anne,
who even tries drugging her mother
into submission, shows why they
were justifi ed in fearing the outside
world and treating the apartment
building, small and dirty as it is,
as their sanctuary.
Chevalier has a background in
French theater; the opening credits
tells us that she’s a member of the
venerable Comédie Française. Sukowa
is a veteran of New German
Cinema, having starred in gay director
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s
“Lola” and “Berlin Alexanderplatz”
and several fi lms by Margarethe
von Trotta. Her performance has
a Teutonic coldness. “Two of Us”
avoids the temptation of romanticism.
Rather than hearts and
fl owers, it does its best to bring
forward the story’s dark intensity.
Meneghetti is an Italian who recently
moved to France. While I
don’t know his sexual orientation,
the feeling of displacement in one’s
own home lingering behind the
fi lm resonates in several ways.
Meneghetti tends to speak with
images rather than words. We
learn about Madeleine’s stroke by
seeing an untended dish of food
on a burning stove, in danger of
causing a fi re, in an extended shot.
The fi nal scene uses an Italian
pop song from the early ‘60s to tell
the couple’s story. But the thrilleradjacent
touches never really pay
off. Unless I missed something, the
dream scenes showing two young
girls who may be in danger don’t
turn into a coherent subplot, beyond
serving as a vague metaphor
for Nina and Madeleine’s relationship.
All too often, LGBTQ identity is
seen as a recent trend, even by heterosexuals
who are basically sympathetic
to us. “Two of Us” shows
what happens when liberation is
more theoretical than practical
and easier to live out in your 20s
than 70s. Unlike many fi lms about
lesbians by men, it avoids leering
at them. It gazes hard into darkness
without being defi ned by it.
TWO OF US | Directed by Filippo
Meneghetti | Magnolia Pictures |
In French with English subtitles |
Starts streaming through New Plaza
Cinema Feb. 4
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