The heat that Heart skipped: An introverted Toback remake

photo: Katie Brennan

Toback got fingered: Duris

Details

The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Wellspring, opens July 1

Related Content

• Cannes Fetish Porn? Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone, Sex Tourism in Paradise (Love)
  May 17, 2012
• Film Director Predicted 9/11!
  September 9, 2011
• Read My Lips
  August 17, 2011
• Klitschko
  October 19, 2011
• Hysteria
  May 16, 2012

More About

• James Toback
• Romain Duris
• Jacques Audiard
• Harvey Keitel
• Rupert Everett

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

The borders of James Toback's fiery, absurd, and often unendurable movie universe are defined by his obsessions (pussy, classical music, pop, Dostoyevsky, scam-level crime, gambling) and by his narcissistic desire to foreground his impulses. Which makes Jacques Audiard's retread of Fingers— Toback's 1978 debut and the most stirring of the man's self-imploding projects—a perverse act of auteurship. We're several steps removed from the scenario's original bipolar heat, of course, leaving us wondering with The Beat That My Heart Skipped whose monomanias these are, and why we should care.

Toback's hero, personified in a nerve-wracking epileptic performance by Harvey Keitel, is a classical pianist obsessed with '50s girl group pop, a rabid extrovert so pent up he's liable to explode like a canned firework, an intense romantic who works collecting from his loan shark father's welshers. The sleek, Rupert Everett–ine heartthrob Romain Duris attempts to fill out the role's contradictions, which are narrowed down to taking piano lessons, listening to techno, rousting squatters from his boss's buildings, and enduring his mini-mobster dad (Niels Arestrup). Audiard's primary goal, it seems, was to render Toback's espresso-jacked nuttiness cool, introverted, and romantic. The almost completely nonverbal relationship between Duris's cool cat and the Chinese piano coach he finds (Linh-Dan Pham) feels extraneous, but it's fascinating enough to warrant an entire, more patient movie. As it is, Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no Fingers.