"De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté"(2005)...aka "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" written/directed by Jaques Audiard is a French remake of James Toback's cult movie "Fingers" (1978) with Harvey Keitel. The film tells the story of a young man Thomas (Romain Duris) who is torn by two different sides of his personality - one dreams of becoming a virtuoso piano player and the other - a ruthless debt-collector and enforcer. I think that Duris's was the one of the best performances of last year - so convincing he was as a man who walked on the edge of two realities. The best moments of the film are the ones between Thomas and his piano tutor, the girl whom he hired to prepare himself for an audition that was offered to him by a man who had been the manager of Thomas's late mother, the talented concerto pianist. The man remembers Thomas who had inherited his mother's talent and used to study piano seriously until his mother died when he was 18 and he joined his father in the "real estate" and debt- collecting business. The tutor, a young pianist from China who arrived to Paris recently, does not speak any French and Thomas does not speak any Chinese - so they have to relay to music to understand one another. The film is not perfect, and I am not too fond of director Jaques Audiard's frequent and abrupt cuts of the scenes but it is superbly acted, energetic, and well written.
