Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Christopher Culver The 2005 French film DE BATTRE MON COEUR S'EST ARRETE ("The Beat that My Heart Skipped") is director Jacques Audiard's remake of the obscure 1978 American film FINGERS.Thomas (Romain Duris) is a shady real estate developer in Paris, releasing rats in apartment blocks to drive out the residents, then buying up the property before they can move back in. He is torn between this dishonourable profession like his scumbag father (Niels Arestrup) and a career as a concert pianist like his late mother. Seeking a way out of his violent lifestyle, he hires a Vietnamese pianist (Linh Dan Pham) to help him reach a professional level, and though they share no common language, it proves a fruitful partnership.Though the story remains powerful for much of its length, things seem somewhat rushed towards the end. It is suggested that character of Thomas' father's ex-girlfriend will play a major role, but then she disappears. And the ending itself, which I won't give away, is an ambiguous statement about whether Thomas has found peace with himself or not. Perhaps these flaws were present in FINGERS, I don't know, though I do know that the remake that is DE BATTRE has 17 minutes of new scenes, mainly dealing with Thomas' work with his piano teacher.Regardless of its plot and the comparison to the original, what makes DE BATTRE an interesting effort in itself are the performances. Many viewers will have known Romain Duris only from his turn as the innocent European manchild Xavier in 2000's L'AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE and its sequels. Here, however, Duris convincingly plays his occasionally villainous role and keeps up the nervousness of a man who can't find a way out.The film's soundtrack is an unusual mix of obscure pop, classical piano, and (Tom's personal favourite) the electro genre that exploded in 2005. The film music by Alexandre Desplats won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005.

secondtake The Beat that My Heart Skipped (2005)A striving, serious movie (even the weirdly incorrect title is serious) that ends up being an up and down jumble. I wanted to really get into this because it has a great immediacy at first, some petty violence, some general shyster gangsterism in modern Paris. The filming is fast camera stuff, lots of disorientation alternating with closeups up expressions and other moments of peace and beauty.There are deliberate contradictions in the style because the main character is a giant contradiction. Played by the charming young actor Romain Duris, we are pulled into his real estate terrorism (extortion of various kinds, kind of low level mob stuff) and then into an utterly high brow pianism as he tries to return to the concertizing career he once considered. So we go from bashing faces in to playing Bach on a Steinway.This is great. I like the premise. This ends up being the only real premise, however. There are nuances--he sleeps with the opposing mobsters girlfriend as well as his best friend's girlfriend, he has a Chinese piano coach who knows no French (and he knows no Chinese), his father is a bit of a douchebag and yet the son tries to help with his mobster doings, and so on. It's pretty fascinating and yet it all ties to the one large idea of a man searching for his better self. So the problem is a story that has more meat and sense of progression to it. Yes, we eventually get to the recital tryout, as expected, but it's too expected. A little.There is problem in the filmmaking, too, and for me it is partly editing and partly overall direction, which leads in the end to a flatter character development than a movie like this demands. I mean, compare the characters to those in something like "Midnight Cowboy" or even the contemporary French film "The Piano Teacher" and you'll find a different way of building intensity and meaning. I'm also thinking Duris is more Richard Gere than Al Pacino, in terms of sheer ability.Because a lot of the effect of the movie is kinetic, or the opposite of kinetic (in the piano scenes), I recommend seeing it big big screen. Which I did. That propels the many scenes of violence and might help keep them from being redundant. There are unlikely moments (landing the girlfriend in the bathroom, even for a hottie like Duris, is taking improbable film noir detective sex appeal rather far), and in a highly realistic film, almost cinema-verite at times, this chips away at the whole. It reveals a feeling of being a movie built on movie-making tricks too often to pull you totally inside.See it? By all means. It has moments, it has interest, it has fun themes (like the language barriers throughout). It really had potential. But have some perspective on it, too.

lor_ The interviews included on the DVD release point up a central difficulty with this Jacques Audiard movie -it shouldn't have been made in the first place.He states that a producer approached him to do a remake, after that guy recently remade John Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. Rather than turn him down flat (or pitch a more original notion), Audiard acquiesced and chose of all things, James Toback's FINGERS to re-do Gallic style.OK, I don't like the concept of remakes, but given how old (and tiring) that whole debate is, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. But Audiard enlists a previous collaborator (Tonino Benacquista) to script with him, and we find out Tonino didn't like Toback's film at all, and didn't like the notion of remaking it.So far, so bad, but the coup de grace is both men asserting they've kept the themes and main character (Harvey Keitel's memorable pianist/gangster) but jettisoned the rest of FINGERS. Fine.Finished film annoyed me thoroughly and repeatedly. It would take more than 3,000 words (triple the IMDb limit) to catalog the missteps or downright cheats committed here, but I'll chronicle just the most alarming. Audiard lost me from the outset with the edgy, jittery hand-held camera -so corny now through overuse, and quite distracting. Midway through the film he has a lengthy conversation between star Duris and his partner in crime in which he switches to traditional over-the-shoulder reverse shot closeups. BUT, Audiard consistently crosses the center line and violates the most basic of editing rules (Filmmaking 101), causing their heads to bounce back and forth from left to right side with each cut. Total incompetence.Audiard's explanation of why he chose Duris to star (boiled down, it's "flexibility" in approaching a surface/external character) is OK. But Duris really wore me down, a boring, one-note and pointless performance. He's a big star in France, and suitably charming/sexy (I enjoyed the fluff that was HEARTBREAKER), but I don't see any acting chops there at all. His smugness on screen reminds me of that stand-up comic London Lee of 3 or 4 decades ago, whose routine was to smirk and make fun of how rich and wonderful he is (sort of the opposite or Rodney Dangerfield, turning self-deprecation humor on its head). Duris is in virtually every frame of Audiard's film -too much of a bad thing.The simplest of boy/girl relationships in BEAT MY HEART (now there's a better English-language title!) are bungled. When Duris professes out of nowhere his love to Aline, the wife he's been facilitating a colleague's cheating on, she hops into bed immediately, falling for that line. It's filmmaking on the level of late night skin-shows made for cable, a pernicious "short cut" to sex approach that has infected lots of movies and TV -take for example the silly, wham-bam sex sequences in the British TV turkey trilogy RED RIDING. Similarly, his having his way with the poor little Russian plaything of a gangster is ridiculous. And no more ridiculous than him finally confronting said gangster in a crudely done ("2 Years Later" card inserted as the height of bad script structure) and corny epilogue.I can't even get started with the hokey (but central) subplot concerning hero's dad Niels Arstrup. This is not just mediocre 21st Century filmmaking but meretricious slop. A film industry where remaking Toback movies is considered OK is artistically bankrupt.

tom van de Bospoort A nice look at the thug, shows that a thug can change for the better but never really does. Shot nicely and well acted, but as with a lot of French films I often feel that something is missing, a bit of umph, a bit of extra drama to draw you in makes you really feel for the characters, never the less this is the best french film for that I have seen, and therefore gets a well deserved 7/10.Not a must see, but is very enjoyable, one for those French film fans more than just film fans.Extra steps needed to take this from a good film to a brilliant or excellent one.