The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Americans have been remaking French films at least since the thirties when Pepe le Moko became Algiers, but French adaptations of American movies are another matter. Some sources have identified The Beat That My Heart Skipped, based on James Toback's 1978 Fingers, as the first French remake of an American film. While numerous French films have been inspired by American movies, this claim may be true. Regardless, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is one of the best, most completely satisfying films of 2005.

Our hero, Tom (Romain Duris), is a Paris thug. With his associates Fabrice (Jonathan ZaccaÏ) and Sami (Gilles Cohen), Tom runs a real-estate scam in which immigrant squatters are forced from derelict buildings (this aspect of the film carries even more resonance given the recent events in Paris). Tom is also coerced by his father, Robert (Niels Arestrup), into collecting some debts and becomes entangled with a Russian gangster, Minskov (Anton Yakovlev). But what he really wants to do is . . . play classical piano.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a portrait of the war waging within Tom between the vicious hoodlum he is and the sensitive artist he wants to be. He longs for a career as a concert performer but at thirty is a tad too old. Nevertheless, he lucks into getting an audition and prepares with the help of a Vietnamese pianist, Mao Lin (Linh Dan Pham), who speaks little French (he difficulty of communication is a major theme). Complicating matters further is Tom's affair with Fabrice's wife, Aline (Aure Atika).

Director Jacques Audiard and co-screenwriter Tonino Benacquista retain the outline of Fingers, while embellishing it primarily through making Tom more sensitive and tortured than Harvey Keitel's Jimmy (Is Tom's name a tip of the chapeau to Patricia Highsmith's conflicted Ripley?). Robert's role is bigger and he is more complex than the goonish father played by Michael V. Gazzo in the original.

Mao Lin is a new character and, except for dropping the institutionalized mother, the women's roles are greatly expanded. There is also much more music. One key sequence, the gruesome fight to the death at the end, is very similar to Toback's, though Audiard and Benacquista add a very satisfying coda to this showdown (this episode resembles a similar sequence in Woody Allen's Match Point).

It is fascinating to watch the crudely self-conscious Fingers after seeing The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The film by Audiard, previously best known for Read My Lips, also written with Benacquista, achieves a better balance between Tom's two selves, making a more effective existential statement. While Keitel is all coiled, nervous energy, Duris is more convincing as a potential artist. Jimmy enjoys exploding; Tom regrets the violence to which he must descend. The entire cast of The Beat That My Heart Skipped is excellent, especially Arestrup, as that shuffling trainwreck Robert.

Wellspring provides a smooth widescreen transfer with excellent sound and nifty interviews with Audiard, Benacquista, and composer Alexandre Desplat, all of whom discuss their debt to film noir. Audiard reveals that his producer wanted him to remake John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and resisted re-doing Fingers, a project about which Benacquista was also dubious.

Audiard says it is fitting that Tom rehearses Bach's "Toccata in E Minor" because it is a cold work and Tom doesn't have much of a heart at the beginning of the film. Benacquista talks about how he, like Toback, was inspired by Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. There is also footage of the actors rehearsing, as well as more than 20 deleted scenes, most involving music. Notably missing from the extras is anything about Duris' training and Tom's music actually being played by the actor's sister, Caroline, a piano teacher. -- Michael Adams