3/5
Filippo Meneghetti’s Two of Us is an overwrought, sensationalized LGBTQ melodrama with two really strong performances at the center that keep the film from getting too emotionally unbelievable. The film ends up falling squarely in the tradition of LGBTQ trauma theatre. While it may be understandable that two older French women might have difficulty revealing their relationship to their children, Meneghetti keeps needlessly piling on the suffering in ways that smack of cruelty and arise out of misunderstandings that could have been cleared up with characters being honest with one another. This causes the plot to feel more mechanistic, functioning more in service of the director and his co-writer’s whims and caprices, rather than anything that arose from genuine character or relational motivations. Meneghetti does make use of some fantastic close-ups throughout the film to highlight his two leading performers, showing how much they can convey with the simplest flicker of emotion across their faces or the smallest darting of their eyes. Similarly, the production design is quite evocative and used to beautifully (and painfully) illustrate the characters’ isolation from one another during the film’s second act. But Meneghetti throws in unnecessary and heavy-handed dream imagery that, while beautifully shot, is entirely out-of-place in this film that wants to be more grounded in genuine relationships. And he also can’t resist adding unnecessary, and at times pulpy, complications to what could have been a beautiful and simple narrative, taking the film well past the point of credulity by the time the credits roll, so that we have lost much of the emotional connection we have with these characters. It’s a film with so much promise, but it ended up a convoluted mess.
