Film review: Two of Us finds poetry and passion in old age
The need for agency and honesty comes through in a beautifully shot and unexpected first feature
VIFF Connects presents Two of Us until April 1
PASSION AND DEVOTION: onscreen, they’re usually the domain of the young.
But Italian director Filippo Menghetti’s sensitive and captivating debut feature Two of Us shows that love can be even more intense and complex in the elderly—in this case, between two women. At the same time, he manages to explore the burning need for agency and the right to live our own truth.
Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) are pensioners who have concealed their decades-long relationship by living in apartments opposite one another in an old town in southern France.
The location is important: the quietly elegant “Mado”, as Nina lovingly calls her, raised a family in a place where everyone seems to know each other; her daughter is the local hairdresser, and she has a close bond with her young grandson. In her 70s, is it worth risking a family rift by coming out? Meanwhile Sukowa plays her contrasting compliment: the former muse to legendary German directors Rainer Werner Fassbender and Margarethe von Trotta makes a welcome return as a feisty retired travel guide who is prodding her partner to move to Rome, where they can be themselves.
She needs to be strong-willed, because of a tragedy that hits and separates the two, Mado suddenly thrown under the guardianship—and guard—of her oblivious children. Understandably, her daughter becomes increasingly confused and suspicious of the pushy neighbour who can’t seem to stay away from her mother. Meanwhile Nina is on the brink of losing it, forced to watch the coming and going at her partner’s apartment through a peephole in her door.
Menghetti and his two stellar veteran actors handle all of this with nuance and intimacy, never descending into the maudlin or melodramatic. Dream sequences—two girls playing hide and seek around the town’s plane trees, one woman dragging the other out of its river—make what is essentially a romantic drama feel more like heady poetry. Cawing crows, empty windswept cafes, and ticking clocks constantly remind you of mortality and the pull of time. And you’ll be surprised at how much thriller-like tension the director builds out of Nina trying to find and help Mado without giving away their secret.
The revelation here is not just that we come to see these two as vital, dedicated partners as full of yearning as anyone a fraction of their age, but walk away questioning the way we institutionalize the old and ill. Or why anyone has to go through life pretending they're someone they're not.
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