Music can't tame the beast

As he walks -- no, make that hurdles -- through the electrifying French film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, the young actor Romain Duris brings to mind another dirty-sexy guy who once vaulted through the movies with barely restrained frenzy. Duris, who wears a black leather jacket in the film, along with the ankle boots of a tango dancer or a pimp, is playing the character inhabited by Harvey Keitel nearly three decades ago in a cinematic wack job called Fingers. Summoned as if from a fever dream by the writer and director James Toback, Fingers doesn't just get under your skin; it slithers.

Like that film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is the story of an enforcer and would-be concert pianist that hinges on the struggle between the two sides of the male animal, the beauty and the beast. Keitel's character, Jimmy, given to wearing a black leather jacket and a white silk scarf, plays Bach in his apartment on a baby grand piano; the rest of the time he's a crude hustler of women (a Toback signature) and a reluctant fixer for his monstrous father. In Jacques Audiard's superb remake, which improves on the original significantly, investing it with aesthetic grandeur and emotional depth, Jimmy is now Thomas (Duris), a real estate entrepreneur with an unlikely dream. As in the original film, music soothes but doesn't fully tame him.

Audiard, whose films include A Self-Made Hero and the art-house favorite Read My Lips, is a master of indirection. His lyrically titled new film opens with a quiet, uneasy scene that makes sense only in retrospect.

Two men sit in a small, claustrophobic room, cigarette smoke curling through the soft light. One of the men is talking about his father, while the other just listens, impassive as a stone. The angry words pouring from the talker soon mellow as he reveals that his father, who once drove him crazy, had been reduced by illness, flipping the parent-child dynamic. "I nursed him like a baby," he says. The listener, whom we will shortly come to know as Thomas, our doubtful hero, barely stirs, even when asked, "Do you believe in God?"

There are all kinds of gods in The Beat That My Heart Skipped -- old gods, dead gods, gods of power and sex and money, and the fallen god Thomas calls Father. An unshaven wreck with a body gone soft with age and fat, Robert (Niels Arestrup) has seen better if not necessarily kinder days. He trolls the murkier depths of real estate, but he's no longer on his game and leans on his son to close his dirty deals. As he sits across from Thomas in a cafe talking about his hot new girlfriend, dressed in a pale yellow suit jacket with greasy hair curling over the collar, he looks lost, condemned. The disgust in Thomas' face as he sits across from this ruined spectacle is matched only by the unmistakable love.

That's getting ahead of the story, which takes off like a shot. After that quiet, meditative prologue about fathers and sons, the film cuts to Thomas and two others, who are soon entering a derelict building under the cover of night. There, he and the other men, both dressed in suits, release bags filled with squealing rats. The rats are part of the arsenal of weapons that the three use to force poor people from valuable properties. In this dark place, where terrified immigrants scramble for their belongings, moaning and illuminated by the glare of flashlights, we are a long way from tenderness, and from discussions of faith and fealty. Thomas takes in the chaos with seeming disinterest, more like a bystander to a crime than its perpetrator.