Two: a fair and gripping love story [critique]

Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa are imperial in this first film by Filippo Meneghetti.

Nina and Madeleine are deeply in love with each other. In everyone's eyes, they are just simple neighbors living on the top floor of their building. On a daily basis, they come and go between their two apartments and share their lives together. No one really knows them, not even Anne, Madeleine's caring daughter. Until the day when a tragic event changes everything…

Arte will rebroadcast a lovely first film this evening: Twoby Filippo Meneghetti, who is already visible in replay on the channel's website. Worn by talented actresses, Barbara Sukowa, Martine Chevallier and Léa Drucker, it charmed First during its cinema release, in February 2020. Moreover, the premiere is in the spotlight of a documentary, at 10:30 p.m., entitled Barbara Sukowa: A muse of German cinema and it is also available for free on the channel's website.

Here is our review of Two :
Nina and Madeleine, retirees and neighbors, have, for the final stretch of their existence, the temptation… of Rome. To finally settle there together, as a couple, and sell their respective small apartments to pay for this freedom. But if Nina is alone, Madeleine has two grown children. Never, in twenty years of hidden passion, has she succeeded in coming out. This sale of the family apartment offers him the opportunity to take the plunge. But also puts her back to the wall to the tune of “now or never”. She will not succeed, Nina will reproach her sharply and, in the process, Madeleine will have a stroke which will leave her greatly diminished. So, beyond the feeling of guilt, another challenge begins for Nina: how to slip into the convalescence process of Madeleine, greatly diminished, when for her children she is only the neighbor?

This first feature has the singularity of talking about coming out by reversing the roles between generations. And Filippo Meneghetti has the good idea of ​​not locking her into her subject but of mixing together a societal film, romantic melodrama, family drama and even a thriller atmosphere with Nina ready to get rid of those who get in her way , to facilitate the healing of the one she loves. Its scenario interweaves these different colors with great fluidity and without the slightest demonstrative momentum, like the game of the imperial Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa. This is what makes Two as fair and as gripping.