Romain Duris in Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped: A Star in Fragments - Page 2

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.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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