The dramatic essence of romance is to follow a hero torn between his higher calling and lower urges--will he achieve his quest or will he be permanently sidetracked by temptation? (In straightforward romance like High Noon the calling wins out; in ironic romance like Double Indemnity, the urges.) For Tom Seyr (Romain Duris) in Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, the higher and lower registers are represented by his late concert pianist mother and his living slumlord father, respectively. Tom's father occasionally asks him to do a bit of enforcement, e.g., to beat the owner of a couscous joint who owes backrent, and Tom reluctantly agrees when he's not busy using extreme and illegal methods to chase poor immigrant squatters out of buildings he and his own sleazy business partners intend to flip (i.e., following in Dad's footsteps. Audiard's father Michel was a successful screenwriter, who worked on that elegantly unsentimental rat-trap of a heist picture Mélodie en sous-sol (1963), starring Jean Gabin and Alain Delon.) Tom is a thug, but he has what most movies mean by a "soul." He runs into his mother's manager and the man offers him an audition; Tom finds a teacher and sets out to practice, practice, practice his way into a concert career. (At age 28, under a teacher with whom he doesn't have a language in common.)

There's a veneer of unadulterated naturalism over all this nonsense: the couscous joint owner is no melodramatic victim (he strikes first), for instance, and the life of the artist is shown as repetitive and grueling and tending toward neurasthenia. And Audiard has a relentless, exposed-nerve style that might, to the susceptible, seem to be nearly unmediated--the camera is up in the characters' faces and the rhythms are as fidgety as poor, driven Tom. Audiard's video-derivative style is hyperalert to the point of tickiness, maybe too lean and dry to make the story out-and-out laughable, but the story is nonetheless not to be taken very seriously. The problem is not, of course, that it isn't believable but that it doesn't develop a vision of why Tom would choose art over crime.

This missing element is what makes the great romances great--when the hero's quest dramatizes the triumph of deeply held common values, which are made explicit for us as the pattern of existence. It is thus a central problem that The Beat That My Heart Skipped cheats in its terms. Tom chooses between thuggery and a performing career, but from his conversations with his low-life partners it's clear that crime is not being distinguished from commerce; as Audiard says in this Wellspring interview, "[Tom] grows up because music teaches him that wheeling and dealing is a dead end." (In classic, hypocritical "Hollywood" form, commerce in The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a negative value as against art, as it is in the battle between commerce and craftsmanship in Executive Suite (1954), and commerce and journalism in The Insider (1999).) In the single biggest structural change from its source, James Toback's movie Fingers (1978) starring Harvey Keitel, the story then finds its resolution in the legitimate business of musicmaking. What matters for moviegoers, however, is that because Audiard takes the values underlying Tom's choice for granted, he's free to make both crime and art glamorous--the former by means of the "poetic" desolation it leads to and the latter by means of the lift we get from Bach's "austere, difficult, virtuoso" (quoting Audiard) "Toccata in E minor."