NewFest: Quick "Two of Us" Thoughts

A deeply moving Love (at the end of its rope) Story which finds a heart-rending way to externalize the interior emotional toll of being in the closet, Filippo Meneghetti's debut film Two of Us (which is screening tonight at NewFest) stars great German actress Barbara Sukowa (who once upon a time led several of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's later works including Lola and Berlin Alexanderplatz) and French actress Martine Chevallier as long-time lovers who've nevertheless lived in separate apartments across the hall from one another for two decades because of familial pressures. 

Meneghetti manages to juggle more than one stunning metaphor with his and Malysone Bovorasmy's script and his visual cues -- the separate apartments, one warm and full of history, the other barren and full of mice; an on-set of sudden health problems that seem burdened by the weight of crippling secrets as much as they do from any series of misfiring synapses; treacherous balconies and elevators and half-dreamed back-stories of bodies floating in the river with crows cackling overhead -- somehow all of this, which seems a lot, is siphoned down into the service of a true emotional wallop of a story, with superb work from Chevallier and especially Sukowa, who rattles with rage and desperation. 

A beautiful, poignant, and purposefully infuriating film, highly recommended, and one which proves there's still so much richness and drama to mine from the particulars of the gay experience against a hostile world, where ever that hostility -- both inner and outer -- may originate from. Here's the trailer: