The artist/art in question is Jacques Audiard and 'A Prophet'. I saw 'A Prophet' about this time last year maybe earlier but it was good enough for me to remember it at the end of the year as one of the years best. It might not be the best gangster movie ever BUT it is the best prison movie ever...
Anyway, to The Beat my Heart Skipped- all i ask is that it be half as good as 'A Prophet'. But that's a pretty big ask...
No, it's not as good as A Prophet but few things are. It is very good though. I don't know how but Audiard just seems to be able to siphen these stellar performances out of his leading actors- Romain Duris is brilliant. He plays a thuggish property developer,making people leave their homes and them buying the real estate for a song. At the same time, he decides to take up the piano again, 10years after playing and his concert pianist mother died. We know he's still greiving his mother when he reacts poorly to finding out his father (Niels Arestrup in a similar role to A Prophet) is remarrying. Almost immediately after returning to piano, he becomes obsessed with becoming a concern musician like his mother and sets an audition with his mother's manager and starts getting lessons from a Chinese pianist- who doesn't speak any French.
As you can see- Audiard- not a fan of a simple straightforward plot.
So now, Duris playing Tom, is juggling his corrupt work life and obsessively practising the same piece on the piano. The way his obsession manifests it's self is best described this way- the plays the same piece of music in the same way, you'd replay a level on a videogame until you complete it. You're so close and yet you're never disappointed enough to stop when you go back to the start.
Meanwhile in his worklife as a way of getting back at his best friend whos screwed him on a deal, HE starts screwing his wife while he's out screwing the other female population of Paris. Apart from revenge, it's not really clear why he does this or tell her he loves her or makes her tell him that she loves him. Tom's just an extreme sorta bloke, sometimes seemingly just doing things for effect like threatening dangerous Russian gangsters and having sex with head gangsters 'moll'. It's hard to describe why Tom is such an interesting character. He's self righteous and arrogant but you could also say that was focus and naivety. Maybe childish is a fair compromise.
Like i said at the start, The Beat... isn't as great as A Prophet and i'd put that down to storytelling. What's great about his films is that Audiard gives his audience a lot of credit for filling in the gaps but i think there's a bit too much of that going on here. I think we need to know more about Tom and his motivation but i couldn't say that it's ever confusing or boring.
And to think this is all loosely based on James Toback's Fingers. I was actually given that movie a few years ago and it's horrible; like Mean Streets on ketamine but Audiard is so brilliant... I'd queue to watch him reimagine Barney's Big Adventure.
I watched The Beat my Heart Skipped (2005) on DVD via LoveFilm.My 2011 in Movies will return with The Mechanic (2010)...
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