Review:The Beat that My Heart Skipped

Mr. Audiard's latest movie - a remake of "Fingers" which starred Harvey Keitel - is an amusing, sometimes brutal, but generally pleasing farce of a drama. The last scene has Thomas's apparent lover and former piano tutor playing Brahms's Rhapsodie No. 2 in G Minor at a recital, while Thomas, drenched and soaked with blood, plaintively observes from his seat. Audiard couldn't have picked a more apt piece to end on. The Rhapsodie, like this movie, is an odd, brooding work defying easy description. It isn't bad, but it's not that good either. The melody is forgettable but agreeable.

As with the Rhapsodie, no memorable theme to the movie emerges, and even at its most frenzied moment, not much is really going on or being said. Still, I don't need a theme spelled out in bold letters to enjoy a movie, and Thomas's character is complex and likeable. If he's not charming some woman, he's terrorizing a squatter or trying his best to play nice with his father, for whom he works as a thug. Perhaps dreaming of a better, different life, after a fortuitous encounter with his former piano instructor, Thomas takes up the piano again to prepare for an audition. These contrapuntal notes - Thomas's thug life and his musical ambitions, of course, make the movie a bit of a stretch but at least it's an interesting stretch. Quite aptly, Thomas decides to play Bach, whose polyphonic music well captures Thomas's Baroque character: he's a bit of this, a bit of that, and all over the place. Just like the movie.