The winner of 8 French Oscars and the BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a tense and atmospheric work, with a terrific turn from Romain Duris as the anti-hero thrust unwillingly into a life of crime. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance provokes a desire to take up his old passion for piano-playing, and he begins lessons with a female Vietnamese tutor in the hope of securing an important audition. But can he leave behind his life of crime, or will he be sucked back into the corrupting Parisian underworld?
Duris has starred in many films over the years, but here he finds a film worthy of his talents; his is a simmering portrait of frustrated masculinity, brimming with self-loathing as he carries out his father's dirty work, beating up and harassing those who cross the latter's path. Yet there is a beautiful tenderness in his scenes with his music teacher - as neither speaks the other's language, they must communicate through music and gesture. Taut direction and a terrific score add to the film's magnetism; it is one of the very best French films of the new millennium.
Audiard's remake of James Toback's classic 1978 film, Fingers, presents a memorable character study about a young man torn between a life of crime and classical music. 28 year-old Tom seems destined to follow in his father's footsteps as a Parisian property shark. However, a chance encounter with his late mother's music agent rekindles a desire for a musical career and hope for a better life.
A recent survey attempted to make clear the links between the artistic temperament and schizophrenia. Had those responsible waited, they could have taken into evidence... more >
A recent survey attempted to make clear the links between the artistic temperament and schizophrenia. Had those responsible waited, they could have taken into evidence a print of writer-director Jacques Audiard’s latest, a French remake of the cult James Toback/Harvey Keitel drama ‘Fingers’.
Audiard’s anti-hero Tom (Romain Duris) is introduced to us in a sleazy leather jacket and slicked-down hair, hanging out with anonymous men in suits mumbling about property. This isn’t the most instantly promising of starts, but it is intriguing: an underbelly of contemporary Parisian society in which Tom turns out to be a heavy, hired by his landlord father to evict debt-ridden tenants by any means necessary.
Tom isn’t just a thug, though: as signified by the oversized headphones he carries with him to every eviction, raid or beating, and the way he skids down corridors whenever he’s on the run, this guy has a rare sense of rhythm. He’s a talented pianist, lapsed admittedly, but now drawn back towards the piano stool and the civilising possibilities of music.
The piano is by now the most overworked instrument in the movie orchestra pit (no-one ever accorded as much symbolic significance to the triangle, or the trombone), there to suggest self-expression (Ray, The Piano) or self-denial and control (The Piano Teacher). There is a little of both these suggestions here, I think, though in a film that ticks metronomically back and forth between one of Tom’s worlds and the other, airy daytime tutorials and post-midnight thuggery. I suspect Audiard was most interested in the duality of the piano’s keys: black and white brought together by an individual who more commonly exists as shades of grey.
Duris is allowed to hold the screen more readily here than ever before: he has a nervous energy that’s hard to pin down (Tom is forever distracted by the alternatives open to him), but never less than compelling to watch. Here is Duris twitching and fiddling his way around the background of a council meeting; here he is again in a bar, his digits spidering over the countertop and forming a fist with which to mark the outbreak of violence that usually marks last orders.
These are, we might assume, the latter-day Hands of Orlac, continually flexing, pushing, trying to find their way up the skirt of a friend’s girlfriend, threatening at all times to get away from their owner. Duris is particularly persuasive in those scenes where Tom crosses the portal from one world to the other: walking in from one eviction and across the foyer of a concert hall to greet an old tutor, regressing in the course of this one sequence from swaggering heavy to meek student, from being The Man to someone who’s not as good in his chosen field as he thinks he should be, or wishes he were.
In his previous films like See How They Fall and the Hitchcockian thriller Read My Lips, Audiard revealed himself to be another French auteur with an almost treasonous appreciation of American film form, but there’s one key difference between Audiard’s cinema and the ways of the West. Duris, a grinning goofball in his earlier work, would simply never be allowed to grow up this way in the States, where he’d be stuck in the same sphere as Ashton Kutcher or Seann William Scott, God bless them, competing for the leads in limply-written romcoms or big-screen revivals of yellowing television series.
Audiard, by contrast, is fascinated by why people do what they do; it was laid out for us in his breakthrough film, A Self-Made Hero, almost a decade ago now, and his characters since have never lacked for motivation. Here, he tackles the father-son relationship the American cinema is obsessed by, and gives it real depth, not least by defining Tom’s late mother (a gifted pianist herself) as a guiding force at least as appreciable as her husband.
Tom’s father (Niels Arestrup) is a manipulative slob who’s about to get married again, this time to a woman who’s clearly out of his league (she’s played by Emmanuelle Devos, which is a start) and only just older than Tom is himself. No wonder the film often returns to Tom simply lost in music, each beat a balm for the personality split that stems from a rip in his genes.
For a film drawing on an original nearly three decades old, it’s surprising how fresh and contemporary The Beat That My Heart Skipped feels. The restless central character doesn’t feel entirely out of time in the age of ADD and OCD, and the thematic material concerning what sons inherit from their fathers, while never going entirely out of fashion, has even taken on political overtones of late. It’s a film about the carnage left behind in the wake of maturity, and the most psychologically convincing movie portrait in years of why men wage the wars, and wreak the havoc, they do.
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