It hasn’t been the best year for French cinema. With a canceled Cannes Film Festival, many of the supposed quality French films skipped 2020, hopeful that they will premiere on the Croisette this coming May.
The result from all of this is a rather lacklustre lineup of films from last year with only a handful of marquee titles managing to breakout internationally; Francois Ozon’s “Summer of 85,” Philippe Lacôte‘s “Night of the Kings,” and Philippe Garrel’s “The Salt of Tears.”
However, intriguingly enough, France’s Oscar submission for the Best International Film Oscar category this year was an out-of-left-field choice. In fact, Filippo Meneghetti’s “Two of Us,” this year’s French pick, had its world premiere back in 2019 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has now been released in the U.S. on VOD.
This suspenseful lesbian romance involves Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Mado (Martine Chevallier), 70-something women who have been living in apartments facing each other for more than 20 years. However, there’s a secret they don’t want anyone to know: They are very much in love with each other and have been in a committed relationship for several decades. Mado’s late husband never knew. They just pretended they were close friends because Mado can’t tell her grown children the truth, especially her son who is still reeling from his father’s death.
They no longer want to hide their secret. We now live in an age where no one should really care if you’re gay or bi or straight. Nina convinces Mado to come out. The timing is perfect. Celebrating her birthday in the apartment, Mado will tell her daughter and son she is in a committed relationship with a woman after she blows out the birthday candles. She chickens out. Our couple has a fight. And then, the film’s coup-de-gras, Mado suffers a massive stroke a few hours later.
As Mado, now a shell of herself, unable to speak or stand, recovers under the watchful eye of a hired nurse (Muriel Bénazéraf) and daughter Anne (Léa Drucker), Nina continuously sneaks into the apartment at night to caress, comfort and speak to her lover. She even manages to eavesdrop on any conversations her partner’s children and the nurse may be having.
This twist turns “Two of Us,” an assured debut from Meneghetti, into a Hitchcockian romance filled with suspense. There’s a lot of sneaking around, peephole watching and an immense amount of paranoia. The sense of history and intimacy the two shared, rendered so humanely and passionately in the first half of the film exudes and authenticity that we can feel Nina’s pain when she starts to lose grasp of Mado.
And while Sukowa’s beautifully oblique performance turns out to be incredibly wrenching to behold, the revelation here is Chevallier as Mado. Frozen-faced, much like Emmanuel Riva in “Amour,” as she watches the people around her, with the body having failed her. There’s no doubt a thousand things rummaging through her head as she observes, quite languidly, the people around her speaking as if she weren’t even in the room. However, we see her piercing eyes staring, in anguish, no doubt, as she tries to regain some kind of strength to reach out to Mado.
Meneghetti co-wrote the screenplay with Malysone Bovorasmy, and their story does runs out of steam near the end, finally deciding to grant the audience an ending they want to be comforted wit. But it’s the middle section that hits home the most. Nina’s desperation can be felt in every scene. She’s a woman so consumed by love, so rabid in her attempts to communicate with her ill lover, that patience is not an option.
Score: B