Review: The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a remake of James Tobak’s Fingers, substitutes the earlier film’s bleak psychosexual head games with a more straightforward tale of one man’s warring allegiances to his father and mother. Tom’s (Romain Duris) shady dealings as real estate broker stand in stark contrast to his dream of being a concert pianist. He’s a man at odds with himself, his nimble fingers employed for contradictorily aggressive and artistic purposes, and Audiard’s inharmonious mise-en-scène—preoccupied with the contrast between light and dark, moral and immoral, hope and resignation—deftly enhances his film’s meditation on the contrary nature of masculinity and filial loyalty.

Rather than attempt to match Harvey Keitel’s drop-of-a-dime explosiveness from Fingers, Duris is all pent-up jitteriness. It’s hard to fathom such a roughneck obsessing over Bach, yet the dashingly disheveled Duris is a magnetic presence, utilizing his shifty eyes, frantic hand movements, and inscrutable smile to ably convey his characters’ inner strife.

When his late pianist mother’s former manager, Mr. Fox (Sandy Whitelaw), offers him an audition during a chance encounter, Tom, who hasn’t seriously tickled the ivories in 10 years, finds himself at a crossroads. And his situation becomes even more complicated when he decides to openly rebel against his alpha-male co-workers—whose use of rats to scare tenants from their homes speaks to their unscrupulous sleaziness—by beginning a torrid, clandestine affair with his adulterous friend Fabrice’s (Jonathan Zaccaï) wife, Aline (Aure Atika).

As in Fingers, Tom is driven to violence by his father’s (Niels Arestrup) guilt-laden request that his son help collect unpaid debts from a big-time gangster. Audiard and co-writer Tonino Benacquista also retain many of that original film’s key events (including Tom’s expletive-filled phone call at a country club swimming pool, and a bloody encounter in a stairwell), as well as its semi-misogynistic portrait of women as either whores or saints.

This remake’s biggest departure from Fingers involves a Chinese piano teacher, Miao Lin (Linh-Dan Pham), who’s just arrived in Paris and speaks no French. The polar opposite of Tom’s controlling father—who derisively dismisses his desire to resume his dream of playing the piano and hypocritically disparages Mr. Fox as “a pimp”—Miao Lin is Tom’s chance at salvation, and her inability to verbally converse with her pupil serves as a symbolic representation of the aspiring pianist’s cathartic struggle to communicate with his artistic instincts.

Audiard captures Tom’s journey toward maternal embracement (via his music career) and paternal denunciation (and the corrupt real estate business that his old man represents) with a relentlessly subjective camera. He creates an intimate proximity through single-take sequences featuring tight close-ups—regularly positioned just below Tom’s five o’clock shadow-covered face, or on his hands as they caress piano keys or Aline’s body—and handheld tracking shots from behind his protagonist’s back. Photographed with off-the-cuff immediacy by Stéphane Fontaine, the film depicts Tom’s precarious balancing act between two worlds by way of washed-out cinematography that’s alternately jumpy (during the depictions of real estate work) and measured (during action confined to Miao Lin’s brightly lit apartment).

Often, this bifurcated visual structure mirrors The Beat That My Heart Skipped’s thematic fixations a tad too neatly, and discussions about how sons paradoxically wind up “fathering” their aging, needy dads—an aside which relates to the central subject of manipulative parent-child relationships—feels overly obvious. Yet Audiard infuses his drama with portentous momentum that’s unforgettable, and his rosy-eyed finale involving Tom’s opportunity to alter his wayward course—a conclusion at variance with the story’s preceding cynicism—serves as an ironically apt ending for a film so doggedly steeped in opposition.