The Beat That My Heart Skipped

The Beat That My Heart Skipped / De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
(Jacques Audiard, France, 2005, 108 mins.)

After the press screening of this inventive reimagining of James Toback's
Fingers (1978), I heard one passholder proclaim, "Implausible!" I heard another
take Romain Duris (the hippie drummer from When the Cat's Away, the upcoming Russian Dolls) to task for his visceral portrayal of a classical pianist (too much
"face squinching," apparently). So don't say you haven't been warned.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I liked the film—and I thought Duris, who looks
like Charlotte Gainsbourg's long lost brother, was pretty convincing on the ivories. Granted, I quite like Fingers (I own the DVD), but I don't think it's a masterpiece.

And although I don't think Audiard's fifth feature is as good as Read My Lips or
A Self-Made Hero (still my favorite), the former SIFF Emerging Master does a surprisingly credible job at shaping what was very personal material for Toback (according to his DVD commentary) into a film with his own unique stamp on it.

The story, in brief, is that Tom (Harvey Keitel's "Jimmy" in the original) is torn between a life of crime (his father's profession) and life as a concert pianist
(his late mother's calling). If that makes it sound like Mean Streets—with classical music standing in for Catholicism—that's because it is (a little). The tension
comes from Tom's increasingly desperate attempts to reconcile the two.

I guess it goes without saying, but there's no way this tale's gonna end well, and
Audiard somehow manages to find a less portentious way to come to the same pessimistic conclusion as Toback. It's a neat trick. That said, The Beat That My Heart Skipped does get off to a slow start—it didn't really kick in for me till the last act—
and Tom is never a particularly likable character, but he is a sympathetic one.

The Neptune: Sunday, 5/29, at 6:30PM and Monday, 5/30, at 2PM.
Postscript: The Beat That My Heart Skipped made my top 10 for the year.