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.
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.