Part psychological thriller, part love story (men and women, parents and children), The Beat That My Heart Skipped is also about what it takes to escape our own prisons. Written by Audiard and Tonino Benacquista, with whom he wrote Read My Lips, the film uses its pulpy milieu as a way to sneak in a meditation on what makes us human. Soon after the rats run wild, Robert asks Thomas to help him with a debtor. Thomas secures the money, but only after Robert has been beaten and his son has exacted bloody vengeance. In the film's most chilling exchange, Robert pockets the cash and coolly says, "Not so hard, was it?" No wonder Thomas looks like a man on the run.
One of the outrageous delights of Fingers is its far-fetched plot, which is a shotgun marriage between a seedy crime fiction and the story of a classical musician, topped off by some 1970s sleaze. Getting inside Thomas's head turns out to be key because, as it happens, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is also an existential mystery.
In time, this restless man will find harmony. He will embark on an affair with a married woman and take lessons with a concert pianist, relationships that will pull him out of his prison and just maybe deliver him. Along the way there will be violence, some ugly enough to make your heart skip, and sex that might do the same. Mostly, though, there will be beautiful images and the joy found watching a movie aimed straight at the heart and head.
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