The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)

The Beat That My Heart Skipped could single-handedly give remakes a good name. Based on the 1978 American movie Fingers, The Beat... stars Romain Duris (L'Auberge Espagnole) as Tom, a hoodlum who works the shady side of real estate--evicting poor families from slums, cutting quick and dirty deals in the middle of the night--following in the footsteps of his sleazy father. But clearly Tom loathes both himself and everything he does. One night he accidentally runs into the man who managed Tom's mother, who was a pianist; the manager asks Tom himself to audition, as Tom once showed promise. All at once Tom hires a tutor and neglects his "duties," raising the ire of his cohorts but starting to make himself happy. This could be hokum about the power of art, but Duris' performance is so visceral, so emotionally vivid and engaging, that The Beat That My Heart Skipped becomes a remarkable parable about the danger of betraying yourself--all the more powerful because Tom's life doesn't simply get better, it grows dangerously more complicated. A superb movie with excellent performances throughout, making Duris' standout work all the more impressive. --Bret Fetzer Amazon.com

Absolutely BRILLIANT film! The best foreign film of 2005 without a doubt!

If Romain Duris' performance had any more heat to it, he would undoubtedly have burned the celluloid straight off the reel, thus ruining this piece of cinematographic genius in post-production. He is alternantively sensitive, rageful, violent, and mundane, all in the course of two hours. Even more remarkably, he manages to pull off these disparate emotions in rapid, BELIEVABLE succession. We get a wonderful image of his character, depressed with his life as a small time thug who works in "real estate," but nonetheless aspires to the greatness his mother achieved as a concert pianist. Your heart will break no fewer than once during his journey, and will probably break at two or three points.

Not only does Audiard explore Tom's (Duris) psychology and personal tragedy, but he also goes back to a subject that he clearly has much interest in, for anyone who's seen "Read My Lips": The idea that love can blossom despite a complete language barrier. The scenes with his piano teacher, Miao Lin, (a Chinese exchange student who speaks Chinese, Viet, and some English, but no French) are almost emotionally draining, as we get tree senses of both frustration and triumph at different points of the film, thanks to Duris' masterful acting and Audiard's insightful direction. The script allows for expansive interpretation, and can show us a very unsympathetic, vulgar, and downright mean Tom, or a very sensitive, aspiring pianist who only wants to succeed the same way his mother did.

Duris very appropriately tows the middle of these two interpretations; there are times at which you love Tom, and others at which you can't stand to look at him. My only minor complaint is the English translation, which at times is a bit awkward and doesn't match the original French dialogue as well as it should. There is a point at which Tom states to his father's newest lover: "J'aime beaucoup mon père." The subtitle reads "I love my father," but really it's more like "I really like my father." I know I'm nitpicking, but I'm not convinced that Tom loved his father at the point in the movie that line is spoken, which is why he says that instead of "J'aime mon père." Minor details and complaints with utter genius, though. If you buy this film, and I highly reccommend that you do, you will not be even the least bit disappointed. April 11, 2008

From the Director of 'Read My Lips,' a French remake of 'Fingers.'

French director Jacques Audiard is perhaps best known for his 2001 film, Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres), a modern thriller about disability, insecurity, love, and revenge. Audiard's 2005 film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon caeur s'est arrêté), tells the story of Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris), a small-time real estate thug who aspires to be a concert pianist. When he is not violently evicting poor families from Paris slums, he is practicing Bach's Toccata in E minor on the piano. Tom is a man filled with self-hatred because he has abandoned his dreams just to earn a buck. The film is actually a remake of James Toback's 1978 film Fingers starring Harvey Keitel, who seems much better cast in the role of Tom. One of the notable differences between the two films is that, despite a language barrier, Tom develops a love interest for his Vietnamese piano tutor, Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham), a theme Audiard also explored in Read My Lips. Ultimately, this film is a lesson about remaining true to one's aspirations, rather than losing one's soul in a day job.

G. Merritt
February 6, 2008

A remake interesting for Romain Duris' role as a villain

The 2005 French film DE BATTRE MON COEUR S'EST ARRETE ("The Beat that My Heart Skipped") is director Jacques Audiard's remake of the obscure 1978 American film Fingers.

Thomas (Romain Duris) is a shady real estate developer, releasing rats in apartment blocks to drive out the residents, then buying up the property before they can move back in. He is torn between this dishonourable profession like his scumbag father (Niels Arestrup) and a career as a concert pianist like his late mother. Seeking a way out of his violent lifestyle, he hires a Vietnamese pianist (Linh Dan Pham) to help him reach a professional level, and though they share no common language, it proves a fruitful partnership.

Though the story remains powerful for much of its length, things seem somewhat rushed towards the end. It is suggested that character of Thomas' father's ex-girlfriend will play a major role, but then she disappears. And the ending itself, which I won't give away, is an ambiguous statement about whether Thomas has found peace with himself or not. Perhaps these flaws were present in FINGERS, I don't know, though I do know that the remake that is DE BATTRE has 17 minutes of new scenes, mainly dealing with Thomas' work with his piano teacher.

Regardless of its plot and the comparison to the original, what makes DE BATTRE an interest effort of its own are the performances. Many viewers will have known Romain Duris only from his turn as the innocent European manchild Xavier in 2000's
L'Auberge espagnole and its 2005 sequel Les Poupees russes. Here, however, Duris convincingly plays his occasionally villanous role and keeps up the nervousness of a man who can't find a way out.

The film's soundtrack is an unusual mix of obscure pop, classical piano, and (Tom's personal favourite) the electro genre that exploded in 2005. The film music by Alexandre Desplats won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005. January 21, 2008

Engaging & Disturbing

This movie revolved around the main character who was a "thug" in real estate. He would do despicable things such as putting mice in commercial buildings, evicting poor families out from buildings & so forth. Later, it was revealed that his mum happened to be a prominent professional pianist before her death. Perhaps, he became the person that he was due to disconnection from his family which comprised of his father. By chance, he bumped into his mum's old manager who suggested him for an audition in playing piano. That's when he started to discover his lost passion. As the movie progressed, his life became more complicated as he tangled himself with his colleague's wife, Russian mafia, and his piano teacher. It's rather a brave and absorbing movie that it needed to be seen to appreciate its intensity. Highly recommended. December 22, 2007

Fine neo-noir.

The Beat My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005)

Audiard (Venus Beauty Institute)'s latest (as I write this) film is a combination of existential crime drama and Shine. Which, I have to admit, sounds like a pretty terrible combination, but this is Jacques Audiard. He doesn't know how to do terrible, and the raft of awards this movie won (including the Best Foreign Film BAFTA) would seem to bear that out.

The story concerns Thomas Seyr (L'Auberge Espanole's Romain Duris), who as the film opens is straddling the fine line between being a real estate speculator and a hired thug, the latter of which has him following in the footsteps of his father, who has grown ineffectual in his old age. Thomas' late mother, however, was a renowned concert pianist, and when Thomas runs into his mother's old manager quite by chance, he finds that his desire to play the piano has never really left him (in his spare time, when not chasing squatters out of his buildings, Thomas creates techno music his father loathes), and when said manager offers him a chance to audition as a concert pianist in his own right, he starts taking a crash refresher course in piano with Miao Linh (Indochine's Linh Dan Pham), an even harsher taskmaster than his father. Complicating all this is Thomas' complicity in the peccadilloes of his business partner, Fabrice (Les Revenantes' Jonathan Zaccai); he enables his pal mostly because Thomas is in love with Fabrice's wife Aline (Aure Atika, recently of Tsunami: The Aftermath) and is trying to find a way to use it against him. Yeah, Thomas is a man whose moral principles are kind of on the shady side-- but he believes, and we believe with him, that getting back into the world of classical music may rehabilitate him.

There's the rub, then-- we, too, believe it. Audiard's prodigy is a well-drawn, sensitive character we can identify with all too readily, for the choices he's faced with and the complications in his life are universal, if on a grand and twisted scale. Did Audiard realize this? I can't imagine he didn't, but it didn't get in the way of his telling a good story. And a good story it is, frenetic (and the piano-practicing scenes are even more so than the thug life, which is amazing) and ludicrous and seven different types of fun. If Kirkegaard had written crime films, he might have come up with something like this. A must-see. ****
December 20, 2007

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