Cinematical

Landing as it does in the middle of a summer movie season in which virtually every major release is either a remake, or else a franchise ender, extender or re-inventer, or else is so self-referential that it might as well be (and I *liked* Mr. And Mrs. Smith), the release of The Beat That My Heart Skipped almost plays like a clever joke. A French remake of an underappreciated American classic (James Toback’s Fingers), it manages to respect both its genre-busting source material and placate a contemporary, highly fractured audience that doesn't want to chose between eye candy and brain food. As such, it’s the kind of film that is just not being made in America right now, and that’s a shame – one would imagine that a fairly complex character study packed into a movie full of sex, violence, and piano virtuosity would be able to gather more of an audience.

The stunning Romain Duris takes the Harvey Keitel role as Tom, the son of a slumlord who makes some kind of living beating up tardy tenants and planting rats in his father’s buildings. After encouragement from the former manager of his late concert pianist mother’s, Tom returns to his own piano playing, practicing every afternoon with a Vietnamese student in between his daily appointments with his band of suited goons. As he works towards an audition, Tom eventually walks straight into a final, fatal fuckup – it’s the last childish mistake he’ll ever make, and it sets off a chain of circumstances that'll leave no room for error.

Tom is obviously the runt of his little gang of real estate thugs. He only wins the bar fights that he can shimmy his way out of, but that doesn’t stop him from jumping into brawls anyway – he’s got that stupid, young-guy over-confidence. He’s a French boy with a very American kind of bravado, but it’s not Keitelian in its intensity. Tom is jittery, but his constantly tapping toes and furrowed brow belie a highly-self-conscious swagger – he’s like Belmondo on Red Bull.

Played by Duris, Tom is distractingly good-looking, and it might prove to be his fatal flaw. With his tight, compact frame, chocolate-brown eyes that simultaneously dart and pierce, and modified early-Beatles haircut, he’s got to work overtime on the intimidation game to overcome his own physical beauty. He looks exactly the way I would like all men to look. At the same time, he reeks of impotence. Though 28, he’s still very much a kid. He sees how women look at him, but at the start of the film, he’s barely able to look back. He’s essentially living in a no-girls-allowed space of unexamined jerkery. When Tom touches his partner’s arm in the opening scene, they’re so close that it’s blatantly closet-erotic, and it becomes almost a little too clear that this is going to be a film that equates “growing up” with the transition from the world of men to the world of women.

Slowly and often wrongheadedly, Tom begins to allow women into his life. First, he starts sleeping with his best friend’s wife – a chemistry-less affair heavy on heavy breathing and light on demonstrable connection. They profess love, but neither is convinced.  They’re both clearly fucking the other guy. It would seem an almost unnecessary subplot, but as Tom starts to negotiate the other women on his periphery, it’s clear that he’s earned some kind of confidence from the affair that he intends to apply elsewhere.

Tom reaches his real breakthroughs with Miao-Lin (Linh-Dan Pham), the non-French-speaking Vietnamese woman he meets every day for piano lessons. Their scenes together are highly charged, although not exactly erotic – as far as mutual appreciation goes, each one seems to have a rollercoaster of an agenda, and the two never quite crash together. Still, there’s an excitement that comes out of the fact that Tom and Miao-Lin are actually managing the tricky business of a disarticulated courtship. They somehow invent a manner of banter around the piano. His playing is proficient but labored, and hers is elegant, natural - you watch him fall in love with it. Sublimation wise, this is almost Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers stuff.

It’s a movie about love triangles, for sure, but the parties are constantly shifting, and no single woman in the film ever seems as important as Tom’s piano. The piano isn’t just the piano – it opens the door to another triangle, by allowing Tom to both resurrect his mother and define himself against his father. If the film’s coda feels tacked on (in fact, the whole exercise starts to fall apart with a failed scene that seems to exist primarily because someone wanted to choreograph a bit of expressionistic violence to The Locomotion), it’s ultimately necessary to prove what kind of love story this really is.

Nominally, it’s a film about a guy using the potential of musical virtuosity as a way out, but its most potent takeaway is its mood, which gets you like a heart attack set on slow. Audiard parcels a lot of this out through his soundtrack choices. The “serious” music that Tom busies himself with is never treated as more important than the colloquial touches that come from the worlds around him. In fact, it's the scenes built around contemporary pop songs (social boredom choreographed to car-commercial techno, a highly-charged nighttime drive set to The Kills) that most successfully push the film’s aesthetic agenda.

Beat is shot primarily with a hand-held camera, in mostly long takes. Most scenes cut out right before something is about to happen, if only to cut into another scene at the absolute peak intensity of the situation. This adds an urgency to even the most meditative moments. If The Beat that My Heart Skipped has a blind spot, it's that narrative strands pick up and stray off, without really going anywhere. Despite the internal revolutions that Duris makes visible, the film’s only structuring element is the audition and its aftermath – because, to Tom, that’s really all that matters.  As such, the picture's middle hour is an almost non-narrative mood collage that is sure to irk the impatient.