JUST THE TWO OF US Trailer (2024) Virginie Efira, Drama Movie

JUST THE TWO OF US Trailer (2024) Virginie Efira, Drama Movie

JUST THE TWO OF US Trailer (2024) Virginie Efira, Drama Movie
© 2024 - Music Box Films

EXCLUSIVE: Deadline can reveal the international trailer for Valérie Donzelli’s domestic violence drama Just The Two Of Us ahead of its festival debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

Virginie Efira co-stars opposite Melvil Poupaud as a woman who falls passionately in love with the man of her dreams and rapidly cements the relationship with marriage.

When they relocate far from her family and friends, her new life slowly turns from dream to nightmare as she comes to understand that she is in the grip of a deeply possessive and dangerous man.

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Efira’s star is on the ascendency following her award-winning performances in films with strong female storylines, including Paris Alice Winocour’s Memories (Revoir Paris) and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children.

Just The Two Of Us will play in the Cannes Premiere section reserved for established filmmakers with a history at the festival.

Actress and director Donzelli made her Cannes debut in 2011 with her second film Declaration Of War in Critics’ Week and returned in Official Selection in 2015 with costume romance Marguerite & Julien.

Donzelli adapted the screenplay from Eric Reinhardt’s novel L’Amour Et Les Forêts, with Venice Golden Lion winning Happening director and writer Audrey Diwan.

The drama is produced by Edouard Weil and Alice Girard at Paris-based Rectangle Productions with France 2 Cinema and Les Films de Françoise. Goodfellas (formerly Wild Bunch International) is handling sales.

Diaphana Distribution has French rights and will release the film in France on May 23.
Launching out of Cannes Premiere, Valerie Donzelli’s “Just the Two of Us” is a feverish psychological thriller about a woman brought deeper and deeper into a toxic relationship. And if Donzelli had always intended to make the project ever since reading the source novel back in 2014, the lockdowns of 2020 helped push certain elements to the front of her mind.

“It’s really the story of a woman trapped under glass,” Donzelli tells Variety. “She’s confined with her husband, isolated and unable to see anyone, cut off from the world. I really wanted to explore how this hold makes you more and more disconnected from life.”

Written by Donzelli and Audrey Diwan, and starring Virginie Efira in a dual role as identical twins, – and produced by Rectangle Productions and sold by Goodfellas – this jangly tale of emotional abuse follows a woman separated from her family, moved to the other side of the country, and eventually isolated all the more by a husband who first seemed like Prince Charming, played by Melvil Poupaud.

Donzelli shot the first part of the film with 16mm stock and bathed the housebound sequences in otherworldly glows and shifting mood lights, creating a stark visual contrast between the main character’s carefree days in Normandy and her suffocated and delirious existence once moved away.

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“The goal was emotional realism,” Donzelli explains. “I wanted the film to put you into [lead character] Blanche’s head, that we would feel the sensation that she feels, and not stick to a pure reality or be on the ground with the subject. I didn’t want to make a message movie, I wanted to make cinema. And that means visual experimentation.”

‘Just the Two of Us’
Diaphana
“All of the optical effects were done live on set,” she continues. “We shot with filters, we shot with distortion lenses, and with mirrors placed on-top of the lens. We left nothing for post-production, and that was very important, because I love to work with my hands. Even if I’m not personally pushing every button, I still see cinema like sculpture or painting, as something really artisanal.”

Of course, there was the challenge of Virigine Efira’s dual role – especially in the many scenes the sisters share on-screen. “From a directing point of view, I had no interest a kind of hyper-complicated war machine,” Donzelli says. “So I acted as I had two actresses. If I had real twins in front of me, I wouldn’t necessarily try to put them in the same shot all the time.”

“I even forgot the same actor played both roles,” she laughs. “When Virginie finished playing one she’d quickly go change costumes to play the other. And I’d ask ‘Where is she? Where is Rose? What are we waiting for?’ And she’d scream back, ‘She’s getting ready!’”

With a darker tone and more kaleidoscopic visual style, “Just the Two of Us” marks a real change of pace for the filmmaker, who was happy to stretch out her wings. “I am 50 years old now, and this is is not a film I could have made at 30,” she says. “I think it required more film experience. I think the film really changed my way or working.”