"De battre mon coeur s'est arrëté" (The Beat My Heart Skipped, 2005), directed and cowritten by Jacques Audiard is another French genre-blurring film. It is primarily a neo-noir (being in color, it cannot be a true noir by my lights), though it reverses one of the most tried and true noir themes: a criminal past re-emerging to pull someone who has tried to "go straight." (The prototype is Jacques Tourneur's "Out of the Past." More recent examples include "Croupier" and "A History of Violence.") In "Battre," Thomas Seyr (chameleon Romain Duris) is a thug whose "career in real estate" primarily involves driving squatters out by violence and intimidation (planting rats in buildings figures prominently in the repertoire of these thugs). In this, he is following (and is called on to abet) his father's dabblings in real estate. "Slumlord" is, I think, le mot juste in English. (I have to sat that Niels Arestrup looks so unlike Duris that considerable suspension of disbelief is required to believe he could be Tom's father.)

Rather than having left gangsterism behind, Tom continues his "career in real estate" through most of the movie. At the same time, dormant aspirations to follow his mother's career as a concert pianist re-emerge. Tom is 29, too old to be accepted by the Paris Conservatory and too old to launch a concertizing career. At some level, he knows this, but he does not want to be told it. He bridles when a conservatory professor (Emmanuel Finkiel) attempts to tell him the facts of life and finds a teacher/coach who does not speak French and is new to the country, The Chinese Vietnamese Paris Conservatory scholarship student Miao Lin (Pham Linh Dan) brings sweetness and order into Tom's life, though I do not hear any improvement in his piano playing. The notes do not flow smoothly.

The film's title is a line from a song (Dutronc and Lanzmann’s "The Daughter of Father Christmas".-- the title line is sung in a deleted scene). I don't know what the skip might be. At least when we meet Tom (before one of the rat intimidations), he does not give any evidence of having a heart. To some extent the film is a Bildungsroman, and Tom does some belated growing up. (Yeah, I know that postadolescence often continues beyond the age of 29...)

His relationships with two women show some maturation: the platonic/pedagogical one with Miao Lin and what seems to be first love with Aline (the beautiful Portuguese actress Aure Atika [Three Dancing Slaves]) the wife of his piggish, philandering partner in crime, Fabrice (Jonathan Zaccaï [My Life on Ice]). So does the contrast between the two meetings with Chris (Emmanuelle Devos [Audiard's Read My Lips, Kings and Queens), the woman his father plans to marry.

Stéphane Fontaine (Talk to Me) provided the noirish look to the intimidation scenes and the love scenes and domestic light for the scenes in Miao Lin's apartment. His efforts were rewarded with a César.

I found more enjoyable (and better) than "Sur mes lèvres," the 2001 film that Tonino Benacquista also cowrote with Jacques Audiard and that starred Devos as the deaf secretary who helps out an ex-con played by Vincent Cassell. Much of this is due to the performance of Romain Duris, who is compelling both as the dissatisfied gangster and as the concert pianist aspirant who is transformed by the immigrant pianist. Tom's frustrations are many, his lowlife father providing more than his share of them.

The old crook father being a drag on the restive son reminded me of one of my favorite neo-noirs of the late 1990s, "Croupier." "Battre" does not have as stylish a narrative as "Croupier" -- and Durais's Tom does not look as weary as Clive Owen did as Jack, the croupier. The other film "Battre" recalls -- not least in being in French -- is "Diva" (recently available on DVD) with its combination of scheming, violence, and (redeeming) music (and a radiant female musical sensation).

There is more erotic heat (between Tom and Aline) in "Battre" than there is in either "Croupier" or "Diva." Alas, "Battre" also begs more questions than either of those movies, complicated as the plots of both of them were.

The postscript (two years later) in "Battre" looks great, but its seeming equilibrium seems extremely perilous to me. (More so than in, say, another of my other favorite recent neo-noirs "Eastern Promises).

I have to thank Netflix for this French find (its recommendations relate to my ratings of other films, of course) to proffer to la Barbara's writeoff.

And I have to express my admiration for the range and ability of Romain Duris (who reputedly did not sleep at all during the shooting of "Battre," putting him in the league of method excess of Christian Bale and the Robert DeNiro of once upon a time). I only recognized Duris as the same actor who played the terminally depressed man in "Dans Paris" or as the young "Molière"  I have not seen his "Adolphe" or "Arsène Lupin" (yet: they are not available here on DVD) and don't remember him in the (much though in my view unjustly maligned) Merchant/Ivory "Le Divorce." Duris may be the French Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or the French Johnny Depp. (Duris was a rock drummer; his sister was the pianist and taught him for the movie.)

The well-transferred DVD includes lengthy interviews of writer-director Jacques Audiard, screenwriter Tonino Benacquista, and the soundtrack's composer Alexandre Desplat (Lust, Caution, The Golden Compass, The Queen, etc.-- his score for "Battre" won a César, BTW, one of eight, including best picture, directing, writing, cinematography, and supporting actor (Arestrup), but not actor, which went to Michel Bouquet as a Mitterandish French president in "Le Promeneur du champ de Mars"). There is almost ten minutes of footage from rehearsal, nearly 45 minutes of deleted scenes (27 bits!), filmographies, a teaser/trailer, and previews from six other Wellsprings films (of these, only "Reel Paradise" looked interesting to me). Alas, there is no interview of Duris.

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD