The cruellest legacy of the cinema is the silence it was born with. It took decades—until 1927—for the movies to find their voice, by which point even the best filmmakers seemed to have forgotten that they, or their characters, had anything to say. This was convenient, because by the time sound came around Hollywood’s producer-controlled studio system had just been consolidated, and loose talk would have ended up on the cutting-room floor. Then the Hays Code, along with standard-issue censorship, helped keep the lid tight. Even as characters onscreen talked volubly, even garrulously, the limitations on what they could say were narrow. The result was that, unlike novels and plays, movies became more or less synonymous with bowdlerizations so ingrained and so drastic that even most ostensible masterworks of realism come off like Candyland to viewers unindoctrinated by studio standards. Still, the enduring effect of this virtual silencing is bitterly paradoxical: it’s the grain of sand around which a glorious aesthetic has been elaborated. Hermetically sealed stories may also be fruitfully streamlined, stripping characters down to a handful of traits that, in the absence of digressions and interjections, focus attention on psychological consistency; self-censorship can yield varieties of allusive subtlety. The better a student of classic Hollywood a director is, the likelier it is that she can adopt its restrictive norms as the forms and styles of well-made movies—of art. More interesting than movies that are industrially silenced, though, are those made by original filmmakers working relatively freely and personally, who’ve smoothed out and glazed over their artistry of their own accord.

So it is with “Two Pianos” and its director and co-writer, Arnaud Desplechin, one of the venerable filmmakers of modern France. Though he started his career in the early nineteen-nineties, and is now sixty-five years old, he nonetheless bears the enviable mark of eternal youth. His movies exude eagerness, energy, verve in storytelling, and unmitigated confidence in the emotional power of the cinema itself. But, because French cinephiles have done a better job of studying and absorbing the styles of classic Hollywood (not least because of the legacy of French critics of the nineteen-forties and fifties who were pioneers in recognizing Hollywood directors as artists), they’ve also done too good a job of perpetuating, in modern guises, the same constraints that filmmakers of earlier generations endured.

“Two Pianos” is a melodrama that’s gleefully constructed around melancholy passions. Mathias Vogler (François Civil) is a still youthful concert pianist who, after years of teaching in Japan, returns to his native Lyon, in central France, having been summoned back by his longtime mentor, Elena Auden (Charlotte Rampling), a celebrated older pianist. Elena wants him to perform with her in a concert for two pianos and orchestra, and his homecoming is news in the local music scene, which he departed years ago, on the verge of a significant career as a soloist. The very night of his arrival, he comes face to face with Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a long-ago girlfriend, an art historian, who spurned him for his best friend, Pierre Solal (Jeremy Lewin), a gallerist whom she went on to marry. The breakup with Claude is why Mathias left Lyon and radically changed his life, and their encounter brings his romantic agony rushing back. He drinks like a fool and acts like a jerk. When he lands in jail, his agent, the worldly-wise Max (Hippolyte Girardot), gets him out, sees that he attends rehearsals with Elena, and tempts him with offers of gigs.

Mathias is staying with his mother, Anna (Anne Kessler), in the apartment where he grew up, and chance intervenes again: walking through a public park, he sees a young boy whom he considers his own childhood doppelgänger. Then, realizing that the child, named Simon (and played by Valentin Picard), is Claude’s, he becomes convinced he’s the father and tries to insinuate himself into Simon’s life—and into Claude’s. There are many more complications that tangle these relationships and bring the main characters’ past lives ever more sharply into the spotlight. What hangs in the balance is a triangle of interlocked possibilities—on one side, Mathias’s possible relationships with Claude and Simon, and on the other his artistic connection to Elena, who hopes to keep him in Lyon and reignite his concert career.

“Two Pianos” is built, above all, on a series of coincidences, which Desplechin has the wisdom—and the classical sensibility—to cloak with an inevitability that lends the story the force of destiny. The scene that brings Mathias and Claude together again is built from a devastatingly clever series of utterly unconnected circumstances—none sufficient, all necessary, and timed with the mechanical precision of screwball comedy. It’s only one of many such Rube Goldberg-esque turns of carefully constructed randomness, which quickly pile up with an oppressive inexorability that is bound up with Mathias’s return home—where else will the past surge back with the force of the tides?

The movie’s script is multilayered, with a bare framework that accumulates rich texture by way of moment-to-moment action and dialogue. (The end credits suggest where the layers come from: Desplechin wrote the story with Kamen Velkovsky, and then the two, together with Ondine Lauriot dit Prévost, adapted it into a screenplay, with the collaboration of Anne Berest.) There are micro-twists within the major ones, expressive fillips that blend confessions and aphorisms, and grand reflections along with jousts of seductive wit. When Mathias heads straight from the airport to a salon-like reception in honor of Elena, the tone of the event is set when a butler hands him a necktie to borrow. The scene’s dramatic import is packed with a heavy dose of backstory, as Elena reminisces about discovering Mathias’s precocious talent. She calls herself a monster for avoiding family life in favor of her music career, and she expects Mathias to be one, too—to take on the same burden of ruthless commitment. Yet, despite the film’s foregrounding of music, including with brief but alluring snippets of performance, the subject remains abstract. Elena and Mathias play Bartók and Bruch; Elena, in a planned solo recital, plays Debussy’s “Estampes,” but not before telling Mathias, “I hate Debussy,” a remark that ends the scene. Mathias never gets to ask why, and viewers never get to hear her answer.

Writing about “Michael” last week, I noted that the script, by John Logan, didn’t touch on the three fundamentals of money, sex, and politics, and, as a result, left its protagonist a cipher of musical talent and success. This wasn’t unexpected in a commercially engineered Hollywood blockbuster, but I was more surprised to find that “Two Pianos” is only one for three. There’s sex, in the most conventional way, pneumatic and perfunctory, merely to signify forensically that it has happened, with no distinctive action and no casual talk. Throughout the film, the conversation (and there’s plenty of it) serves either to nail down plot points and character traits—or, as in a few Jewish riffs, as ornamental as sprinkles, to suggest substance that’s never developed.

From the movie’s first scene, the calculated silences come off not merely as a failure of screenwriting but as an approach to cinematic form. In the living room of a casually posh apartment, Pierre has just got young Simon to sleep and comes out to where Claude, awaiting him, asks him to tell her a story. When he playfully but earnestly dispenses a tale, from Jewish folklore, of a prodigal son’s return, she sharply asks whether he’d wanted to abandon her. At that moment, Desplechin cuts to Mathias, studying a score on an airplane, ending the scene between Claude and Pierre just when it was just getting started. The rest of the film is filled with such stifling cuts, with scenes that dispense information without exploring it. Pierre’s Jewish identity is heavily emphasized through what Claude calls his endless stock of stories. But the irony of those stories’ ironies, the paradox of their paradoxes, is that, instead of evoking the significance of that heritage, they merely stand for it. Similarly, the direction—and its corollary, the editing—allows nothing extraneous to detract attention from the script’s meticulous and sturdy construction. Desplechin seems to burrow back down through the thickly applied matter of daily life, past the local Lyon sights and the heady milieu of classical music, to reach his bare framework again. The film’s over-all aesthetic of headlong elegance—of dramatically precise images, and carefully calibrated and sensitive performances that never let loose—thrusts the story’s thin but solid lines to the fore.

For a long time, I’ve felt that Desplechin, a prodigiously talented filmmaker, turns himself into a mere functionary of his own scripts, as if taking pictures to illustrate them. There have been superb exceptions, such as the exploratory “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” and a fervently faithful adaptation of Philip Roth’s “Deception,” but “Two Pianos” is a strongly clarifying movie. It finds Desplechin at the height of his creative energy, and the vigor of the filming is undeniable—but it reflects Desplechin’s affinity for the story, and his delight in unfolding it, with an efficiency that’s disguised as fullness. Desplechin and his co-writers have created an enticing set of characters who arouse a viewer’s curiosity not only about their connections to one another but about their relation to the world in which they live. But in “Two Pianos” there is no such world. ♦