Two women. Two apartments. Two life stories, one house, one love. Such is the setup of this tender tale of the relationship between Nina Dorn and Madeleine Girard, who have loved each other deeply and passionately for decades. A hidden love, since Madeleine has been leading a seemingly conventional life with a now deceased husband and two, now grown-up children. Nina, who has been single and childless the whole time, pushes for their coming out. Madeleine resists. They get into a fight and Madeleine, much softer and more sensitive than her girlfriend, has a stroke that renders her physically impaired and incapable of speaking. Her daughter hires a nurse to take care of her once she is out of the hospital, slowly coming to accept their “kind neighbor” Nina, always eager to step in, without ever suspecting that Nina’s motivation is more than neighborly kindness. Predictably, the hidden love and suppressed feelings lead to a confrontation.
Filippo Meneghetti, who makes his feature film debut with Two of Us, tackles this story of forbidden love with a tender touch and the considerable talent of his two stars, Martine Chevallier, who plays Madeleine, and German powerhouse Barbara Sukowa, who plays Nina. Sukowa was surprised when she got the offer: “What really interested me was that the story was about these two women but seen from the angle of a young man, the director,” she says. “I was quite surprised when I heard that it was a young man – actually two young people – who had written the script, because it’s about two older women. It was (Meneghetti’s) first feature. And I had the feeling he was very passionate about the subject and very determined about the cast.”
Sukowa, whose mother tongue is German (she was born in Bremen and started her career as a protegée of the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder)  was nonetheless undaunted and shot this film in French. Over the course of her career she has done projects in Italian, English and French and recently starred in the TV series 12 Monkeys. Martine Chevallier is a Parisian-born stage and film actress and a member of the Comédie Française. She was married to August Coppola, son of composer Carmine, brother of director FrancisNicolas Cage, until Coppola’s death in 2009.