The Beat That My Heart Skipped - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'Fingers' remake skips overacting, shows some 'Heart'

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

Who would have ever thought to remake "Fingers," the 1978 James Toback film so embarrassingly overacted by Harvey Keitel that it inadvertently became a comedy?

Wellspring Media

'The Beat That My Heart Skipped'

3 out of 5 stars

Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Emmanuelle Devos, Linh Dan Pham, Aure Atika
Run time: 107 minutes
Release date: July 1, 2005
Rating: Not Rated.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

What a difference a performance makes. In Jacques Audiard's French adaptation of the tale, leading man Romain Duris reins in the twitchiness and contradictory impulses of his character, making him believable and nearly sympathetic.

Duris plays Thomas Seyr, a thuggish entrepreneur whose approach to real-estate speculation involves planting rats in apartments and bullying tenants so they'll flee and he can sell the property to developers. Thomas has a sideline job collecting his father's shady debts, but some sliver of his soul leans toward the other side of his family tree: He wants to become a concert pianist, as his mother was before she died.

What makes these dueling ambitions — and his brusquely egotistical romantic adventures — compelling is the way they spring from a single identifiable soul. Thomas' approach to art and love is impatient and unrealistic but passionate; he earns a certain amount of our respect for audacity alone.

The gangster side of the character's life is generally less interesting — aside from one scene in which he shakes down a restaurateur who's refusing to pay his rent — but it seems necessary for the film to allot it the time it gets. If we spent more time following the efforts Thomas makes to break into music, the film would almost surely fall into a more conventional man-with-a-dream mode — and any whiff of conventionality would surely kill this odd but engaging portrait.