Wellspring Home Video VHS & DVD
1 hr 48 mins
Director: Jacques Audiard
The sacred and the profane make edgy bedfellows in director Jacques Audiard’s electric “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” (“De Battre Mon Coeur S’est ArrÃtÈ”). Audiard, who is the innovator and inheritor of the French Noir, made a huge splash a couple years ago with the wonderful “Read My Lips.” He takes an even darker turn this time around, incorporating his frenetic yet organic style into a study of the dual natures of the city dweller. The result is a breathtakingly clear look at the struggles of the spiritually lost hustler Thomas (Romain Duris). Never once do Audiard and Duris force their audience to feel empathetic for Thomas, but instead, they let the audience explore Thomas’ inherent passions and loyalties that lead him on the uneven road to “redemption.”
“The Beat That My Heart Skipped” is the fable of Parisian Thomas Seyer, a shady real estate hustler. His character is akin to novelist Anthony Burgess’ Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” because his life revolves around terrorizing tenants of low-income housing projects to get them to vacate so he can buy up their cheap properties. Thomas zealously repeats these acts with his partners, but isn’t even loyal to them considering he is sleeping with the wife of one. Even that affair is not driven out of real passion, but really just an attempt to at least feel something. Equally spiritually dissolute is Thomas’ father, a broken down businessman who greedily gives his son smaller jobs strong-arming immigrant families to pay up “loans” with outrageous interest.
There is another side, however, to Thomas that may be the key to his aggressions. We learn that Thomas’ long dead mother was a concert pianist and, when he was younger, he was equally gifted. When Thomas sees his former piano teacher in a chance meeting, the teacher offers him an audition, which sends him reeling with hope. He sets out practicing at home and in the city, pantomiming play on any surface available.
This chance also leads Thomas to a Chinese tutor Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham) whose stoic manner and serene apartment are his only chance for self-reflection. It is during their meetings that the audience, along with Thomas, has a chance to breathe and settle. At first he is irritable and frustrated, unable to concentrate, but later he finds something deeper and is able to channel his aggression into his music. But, like all great artists, he is doomed to always struggle with balancing his dark side and his passion.
Where “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” succeeds is in presenting Thomas’ claustrophobic personality in such a way that we never are fully turned off from the film. He is childish and ugly at times, but only in a child’s way and, as portrayed by Duris, this is the cornerstone of the film. We are repelled by Thomas, but never hateful because we see secret self loathing within his grimace. Miao Lin is the only character in the film that recognizes this. The film does ask some leaps of faith, especially toward the end, but whether you find it off-putting or believable all really depends on how you like your metaphors played out.
