Toronto premiere!

"With Deux, Schroeter gave the last decade one of its four or five greatest and most ample films. . . . One of the most spiritually generous films ever made" (Maximilian Le Cain). Isabelle Huppert manages to outdo her pyrotechnic performance in Malina in this gorgeously composed, utterly berserk and immensely moving work stuffed to overflowing with sailors, drag queens, suicides, cemeteries, mirrors, doppelgängers, cabaret singers, serial killers, fickle foxes, religious statuary and stone balustrades, all awash in opera arias. As the title suggests, Deux is about two women, identical twins named Maria and Magdalena, both played by Huppert. Separated at birth, the dissimilar sisters reunite in Marseille as one ends up in the opera world, the other in a lesbian affair. Shot in tableaux and vignettes, some of which evoke Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, others Jean Genet's Querelle (which Schroeter desperately wanted to make into a film before Fassbinder got there first), Deux is one of Schroeter's most nakedly autobiographical works: its idyllic romance that ends in death refashions the true story of the director's tragic first love when he was a teenager. A feast for its performers — Huppert is full-on fearless and Bulle Ogier has a high old time as the twins' secretive, sailor-lovin' mom — Deux "is one of the filmmaker's most joyously kinetic works, even with its surfeit of brightly colored murder and mutilation" (Chuck Stephens, Film Comment).