It has
become customary for tired Hollywood producers to look for European art
house successes which can be remade in a more commercial style. Think of
Cameron Crows remake of Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) as
Vanilla Sky or Mike Nichols remake of Cage Aux Folles. The
Beat That My Heart Skipped, is a rare case of the reverse happening.
After the success of Read My Lips, French director Jaques Audiard
turned to James Tobaks 1978 Harvey Keitel vehicle Fingers, and remade
it as an altogether more stylish and powerful film. Tobaks film, a favourite
of Godard and Tarranino, is often through of as some sort of lost masterpiece
and has been favourably compared to Taxi Driver. On revisiting it,
I found it over plotted and over long, but an interesting and overlooked
piece of cinema history all the same.
The Beat that My Heart
Skipped focuses on Thomas Seyr (a top notch performance from Romain
Duris), who has followed in his fathers footsteps and gone into business
at the sleazy end of the property development market. He and his colleagues
daily routine involves planting rats and setting fire to buildings to drive
tenants out. Sometimes they resort even more direct aggression and violence
in order to get their way. A chance meeting with his long dead mothers
piano teacher brings new meaning to his life…..
Essentially it’s a film
about the age old Oedipus concept, as Thomas flits between the violent
influence of his father and the artistic heritage of his mother. As he
becomes more engrossed with his piano practice, so he is drawn away from
the wheeler dealing lifestyle of his father and business partners. Soon
he is dancing to a different beat. But is his piano playing good
enough to offer him an escape route? Shades of Al Pachinos desire to concentrate
on legitimate business in the Godfather perhaps, also there are
parallels with Billy Elliot as Thomas goes against the grain of
his contemporaries.
After being promised an
audition, Thomas starts visiting a young Vietnamese tutor, Miao Lin, who
has recently arrived in Paris on a scholarship. Miao Lin cannot speak French
and the strained communication between them parallels Thomas’ struggle
with his father and his own sense of identity. Audaird wisely chooses not
to subtitle Maio Lins Vietnamese dialogue to further illustrate the frustration
that Thomas feels.
Good use is made of music
throughout the film, periodically switching from electro to classical to
illustrate the dichotomy of Thomas’ world. Perhaps the most telling scene
has Thomas, hands still bruised from “business” dealings, tapping out classical
piano chords on a bar, while techno music blares out in the background
and his thuggish partners discuss how they are going to drive their next
deal home.
Audaird is quickly is
making a name for himself for turning out well crafted, intelligent thrillers.
From Tobaks source material he has retained the protagonists internal struggle
with the self, toned down his misogynistic tendencies, lost a subplot or
two and given us a more satisfying ending. Now the only question left is:
who is the best one handed piano player, Keitel or Duris?!!!
Patrick
Bliss
Tom
Seyr (Romain Duris) is a nattily dressed 28-year old Parisian real estate
debt enforcer who works for his father (Niels Arestrup), a sleazy housing
profiteer. Seyr and his low-life buddies, Fabrice (Jonathan Zacca) and
Sami (Gilles Cohen), acquire property for resale at a profit, making certain
by any means necessary including violence that all squatters are removed.
When a chance encounter opens the possibility for the opportunity for Tom
to become a concert pianist like his mother, he finds that breaking away
from his past is not so easy. Winner of eight César awards including
best film and best director, Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart
Skipped is a loose remake of James Toback's Fingers starring
Harvey Keitel. In Fingers, Keitel plays the son of a gangster and
a concert pianist who is torn between the efficiency of his father's profession
and the passion of his deceased mother.
The Beat That My Heart
Skipped is shot with dark colours to create a mood of foreboding. It
is not all atmosphere, however. Audiard uses disorienting jump cuts, bizarre
camera angles, and a hand-held camera close to the character's anatomy
to create a frenetic pace and energy to spare. Romain Duris, a young French
actor loaded with talent and charisma, plays the tightly wound Seyr with
manic intensity. He is an operator on the lowest level, beating up restaurant
proprietors that are delinquent in their bills and unleashing rats in a
tenement to drive out the squatters. He seems to relish the jobs he is
asked to do but still dreams of becoming a concert pianist. When he runs
into his mother's former concert manager, (Sandy Whitelaw) he asks for
the opportunity for an audition, then engages a petite Chinese piano teacher
Miao Lin (Linh-Dan Pham) to assess his abilities. Since he does not speak
Chinese and she does not speak French, the film could have been called
Read My Lips II.
Miao is a civilizing influence
and tries to stop Seyr from attacking the piano as if he was clubbing a
tenant behind in his rent but cannot put a lid on his temperament. Their
relationship develops slowly but erupts as both explode in frustration
at his inability to follow instructions or master Bach's Toccata. To make
life even more complicated, he is having an affair with his best friend's
wife, and also brazenly seduces a mobster's girlfriend. While continuing
to develop his artistic sensibility, Seyr carries out his father's suggestions
to "take care" of recalcitrant payees, presumably out of love or guilt
or both. He is very protective of his father and does not refuse his requests,
though he has little respect for him, telling him that the woman he is
thinking of marrying is a whore.
When Seyr agrees to take
on Minskov (Anton Yakovlev), a Russian Mafia boss who does not keep his
promises, it is clear that he is in over his head and he begins to rethink
his relationship with his father. Audiard captures the character's nervous
intensity and brings the macho sub-culture of Paris to life, yet the film
lacks any semblance of warmth. The Beat That My Heart Skipped is
about choices and the willingness to change our direction in life and we
relate to Seyr's struggle with different sides of his personality. While
Duris' performance rings with a fundamental honesty, I found it difficult
to locate a common humanity with this dark, shady man. His cold, abrasive
personality and the film's gratuitous violence make this portrait of the
artist as a young hoodlum difficult to embrace. Somehow thuggery against
poor people and the humanity of Beethoven or Mozart seem incompatible.
While there is a lot to admire here, for me it is a film that my heart
skipped.
GRADE: B-
Howard
Schumann
