The Beat That My Heart Skipped - 2005

Movie #149

3 stars

Tom (Romain Duris) seems destined to follow in his father's footsteps as a sketchy Parisian property shark until a chance encounter with his late mother's music agent leads him to believe he can become a concert pianist. With the help of a beautiful Chinese virtuoso, he starts preparing for a critical audition and making positive changes in his life. But secrets from his past threaten to destroy his plans for the future.

Cast: Romain Duris, Aure Atika, Emmanuelle Devos, Niels Arestrup, Jonathan Zaccaï, Linh Dan Pham, Mélanie Laurent, Gilles Cohen, Anton Yakovlev, David Birge-Cotte

Director: Jacques Audiard

Filming Location: Paris, France

I don't really know what to think of this movie...it's not that I didn't like but I didn't not like it either.  The story was somewhat interesting but the thing that kept my attention was Romain Duris.  His character was so interesting.  Tom pretty much has two separate lives...one of a greedy, pain in the ass real estate broker and one of an aspiring pianist.

One of the first scenes is when Tom and two other guys are carrying sacks of rats into a building.  After they let the rats loose, the viewer realizes that this was done in order to motivate the tenants to move out so they can buy it.  Not soon after this incident, the men encounter trouble at one of the buildings that they own.  Squatters had moved into half of the apartments and it appears that they can do nothing about it.  So...being the nice gentleman that they are, they take baseball bats and destroy the other half of the apartments.

The viewer is starting to not like Tom at this point.  So how does a filmmaker change the viewers perspective?  Close-up shots of Tom as he is going about his daily routine regains the viewer's trust that Tom is humane.  Now the story can progress.

Tom runs into his mother's concert manager who tells him to come in for an audition one day.  Tom then begins to reconnect with his past.  He listens to one of his mother's old piano tapes and hires a piano teacher, a Chinese lady who does not speak any French.  The process of relearning is daunting and it seems as though Tom is going to break.  He doesn't know whether to continue his old ways or start a whole new one.

I don't want to give away much more...the story is rather bland and the glue that holds it all together is Romain Duris' performance.

Overall Recommendation:  Watch it if you really really want to but I wouldn't try and convince you to watch it.

Oh and Melanie Laurent is in the movie for about 3 minutes :)