Romain Duris in Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped: A Star in Fragments - Page 3

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.)

Whether the scenes add up to anything or not, however, Duris holds the screen like a natural--even in fragments. It's a darkly glinting performance, glimpsed piecemeal and on the fly as if the movie were projected on a cascade of broken glass. American stars don't provide much in the way of smoldering anymore; Duris thus seems to be in greater communication with certain intense commonwealth actors--Daniel Day-Lewis, principally, but also Clive Owen, Colin Farrell. There's drama simply in the changeable interplay of the shiny black eyes, the expanse of upper teeth poised over the generous underlip, all of which come together in the most ambiguous vulpine smile in movies. (You may not remember him from James Ivory's Le Divorce (2003), that contemporary transatlantic Jamesian melodrama, which makes the French mother and son the villains but at the same time expects us to share its gruesomely self-satisfied francophilic consumerism. In it Duris's smile is miniaturized under a troll-doll hair-do and comes off as merely quirkily provocative.) As Audiard says of his star, "I couldn't just point a camera at anyone. Romain stimulates one's appetite. One wants to move around him, to watch the way he moves."

As Tom, a man who both fights his feelings and acts them out all over town, Duris has the intuitive control to underplay without making Tom seem obscure or remote. He couples some of the distinctive qualities of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, bottle and bottle rocket, respectively, in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), without benefit of that movie's masterful script and direction--something Keitel himself failed to do in Fingers. Tom is blocked and yet his turmoil has undeniable impact, as preposterous as it is. The wonder of Duris's acting is that he enables us to focus on Tom's mess rather than Audiard's. There's more to Duris as Tom than there is to Tom as written, which is one way you know you've been watching not just a star but a star who can act.

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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