The movie draws most of its charge from Tom's sociopathic behavior, loosing rats in a building at night, beating men bloody, seducing the wife of one man he wants to hurt and the mistress of another. All the same, unlike Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983), I don't imagine that The Beat That My Heart Skipped will appeal to actual criminals, any more than the florid Fingers did. Tom's ambitions aren't inflated by The-World-Is-Yours delusions of grandeur, his criminal behavior overlaps too much with work.

The true extravagance is "spiritual," coming from the juxtaposition of the music scenes and the criminal scenes. In Fingers the extravagance is sexual--Keitel can't have lunch with his father without picking up vibes from a cluster of homosexuals at the bar, can't have a doctor's appointment but we get to witness the painful examination of his prostate. (I would call the latter a unique moment outside of low comedy except that one of the disequilibrating pleasures of Toback's movies is that you can never be sure you are outside of low comedy.) The Beat That My Heart Skipped is thus a peculiar combination of the louche and the high-flown, as if John Garfield's role as the gangster selling protection to boat owners in Out of the Fog (1941) had been grafted onto his virtuoso violinist in Humoresque (1946). It's a movie for slumming culturati--We are all in the stars, but some of us are looking at the gutter.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped is all gesture and attitude passing for sensibility and temperament, more diverting than absorbing. The only thing that gives it conviction is Romain Duris's performance as Tom. He starts out handicapped by the movie's amphetamine style: though he's in nearly every frame, Audiard's rhythms are so insistent that Duris is almost never in command of a scene. When the fancy-primitive writing is at its most suggestive, however, Duris is there: Tom's reluctance to help his father (Niels Arestrup), and his antagonism to his father's fiancée (Emmanuelle Devos), for instance, provide streaks of primal comedy. The father is pragmatic, sensual, literal-minded, corrupt almost as a fact of nature, and Tom's fastidiousness and balkiness, his alternation between sulking and seeking approval from this rotting oak trunk of a man, are incongruously funny, especially in the criminal context. (In Fingers Michael V. Gazzo as the father got the laughs.)

Although the art-vs.-crime dilemma is fundamentally silly, with just a tweak more development most of Tom's actions would at least make plain sense. It may be relatively easy to figure out why he seduces the wife of a man who cheats him, for instance, but we never know what his plan is, if he has one, or what comes of it. There's no point in not plotting the story out more explicitly--it's not a work of naturalism built up from minutely accurate observation. (Judging from Audiard's previous movie, the interminable, baggy business-and-crime picture Read My Lips (2001), which he co-wrote, if The Beat That My Heart Skipped has any shape at all it's due to Toback's original script.)