The Beat That My Heart Skipped: Out of Sync

The idea for the movie sprang from conversations between Audiard and producer Pascal Caucheteux, who asked the director to consider remaking an American film. For inspiration, Audiard turned to James Toback’s debut feature, Fingers, which he had seen upon its release in 1978. However, Audiard’s intention was not to pay tribute to that film, which has the same basic plot elements as The Beat That My Heart Skipped but which the director in retrospect found dated in its mannerisms and “survitaminé” (i.e., prone to certain excess energies characteristic of its time). Rather, he wanted to signal his allegiance to a kind of seventies American cinema. Fingers exemplifies the independent spirit of some of the era’s most daring filmmakers—among them Audiard has cited John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, Barbara Loden, and Leonard Kastle—who rejected the glossiness of Hollywood convention in favor of rough-edged realism and stylistic freedom.

The resulting film ended up departing in significant ways from its source material, the key difference being Audiard and coscreenwriter Tonino Benacquista’s introduction of the student-teacher relationship between Thomas and Miao Lin, an entirely new plot strand. For all the apparent looseness of its structure—the script was designed so that certain scenes could be moved around in the editing process—The Beat That My Heart Skipped is nevertheless much more rigorously composed and deliberately paced than Toback’s episodic, digressive film.

Audiard and Benacquista achieve the film’s peculiar density by running separate plotlines in parallel, as they had done in their previous collaboration, Read My Lips (2001), in which the heroine’s story is interspersed with that of a seemingly marginal character. This counterpoint effect was something Audiard had cultivated right from the start, in the exceptionally intricate construction of See How They Fall. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped, he retains this sense of complexity, evoking a disorderly life that seems like one abrupt incident after another, but he also contains it within the simplicity of a fugue structure. Stéphane Fontaine’s restless handheld camera work thrillingly, and queasily, captures Thomas’s blur of an existence, which forever skates on the edges of other people’s lives.

Audiard’s decision to replace Fingers’ organized-crime milieu with the more mundane world of real estate injects a sense of legitimacy into the characters’ illicit dealings. The hybrid quality of Thomas’s work shows up in his clothing: crisp shirt and tie, topped with a street tough’s armorlike leather jacket. This duality is also evident in Thomas’s personality: despite his brutal nature, he is gentler and more innocent than his counterpart in Fingers, Jimmy, played by Harvey Keitel. Hearing confirmation of his audition date, Thomas breaks into a smile of childlike delight. In general, Audiard’s approach to character is more nuanced than Toback’s. In Fingers, the girlfriend of the hero’s father is a pure cartoon of a centerfold model, whereas in Audiard’s version, she is a canny, mature woman (played by Emmanuelle Devos, the lead in Read My Lips) whose ostensible naivete is belied by her clear-eyed resistance to Thomas’s contempt.

Family bonds are central to the story. “What does it mean to be a son? Is one the son of a father or a mother? What is personal destiny? How is it created?” Audiard has said in summing up the questions asked by the film. The theme of parents and children is established in a prelude, as Sami kvetches to Thomas about the burdensome responsibility of taking care of his elderly father. Thomas, distractedly fiddling with his lighter, seems supremely uninterested, yet this clearly sums up his position on his own father, Robert. Dysfunctional or perverse versions of parent-child relationships recur throughout Audiard’s work: in See How They Fall, a drifter plays the role of abusive-protective father figure to another lost soul; in A Prophet (2009), a fledgling criminal is adopted by a prison-yard kingpin (also played by Arestrup), whom he later unseats in classic Oedipal style.

Though Thomas clearly takes after both his parents, we can all too easily imagine success in his tawdry profession leaving him resembling his father more than his mother. Robert is a faded dandy, visibly wearied by living too hard and too badly, his blond hair and yellow jacket suggesting a man whose very soul is stained by too many Gauloises. The film leaves us to wonder what possible relationship such a cynical lowlife could have had with a concert pianist who suffered for her music. In fact, it seems just as likely that she suffered because of her marriage to a man whose attitude toward music is as dismissive as that of Thomas’s colleagues.

But Robert is not the only important influence in Thomas’s life. Audiard has noted that the character undergoes a process of “feminization” through his contact with women. At the start of the film, he is as casual a womanizer as Fabrice or Sami, but later he shows a tender side in his affair with Aline and in his seduction of a woman (Mélanie Laurent) who is dating his father’s Russian business associate, Minskov (Anton Yakovlev). But it is Miao Lin who has the most decisive effect on Thomas, her calm attentiveness and strictness providing something akin to the parental boundaries he needs. It is with her that Thomas finally achieves a very different, more responsible relationship with a woman, and a new attitude toward life.

The theme of personal change is a constant in Audiard’s early work, all of which is rooted in the milieu and codes of crime cinema. These films depict forms of apprenticeship that partake of both redemption and degradation—a thread that extends right through to 2024’s Emilia Pérez, whose heroine, a struggling attorney, finds her vocation working as a fixer for a Mexican cartel boss. In the director’s early films, apprentice figures include the sweet-natured young man with learning difficulties in See How They Fall, who ends up becoming a professional assassin; the hard-of-hearing woman in Read My Lips, who is liberated via an education in criminal methods provided by an ex-con; and the Maghrebian convict in A Prophet, who ascends to the high ranks of a crime gang. All of these films—together with Rust and Bone (2012), which also involves a macho man softened by the presence of a woman—could be regarded as Audiard’s “stray dog” movies in their focus on socially precarious, unanchored outsider figures.

In The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Thomas’s apprenticeship is a kind of reeducation, an attempt to reconnect with the music that was once an important source of value for him and a cause to which he could commit himself. This process is also a means of relearning empathy and developing a sensitivity beyond the strictures of machismo. The ability to devote himself to someone else proves to be the reward of Thomas’s relationship with Miao Lin, the connection that rescues him from his status as a stray.

Audiard’s and Toback’s films are hardly the only ones to highlight the contradictions between classical musicianship and certain rougher realities. Fingers harks back to Shoot the Piano Player (1960), by François Truffaut (who, incidentally, declared his admiration for Toback’s film), in which Charles Aznavour plays another classical musician whose life has been taken over by underworld activities, supplemented by gigs on the Parisian café-cabaret circuit; similarly, the hero of Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) has escaped a privileged background and the rigors of the keyboard into a new life as an oil-rig worker. The protagonists of both films, moving from the highly formal, quasi-aristocratic realm of classical performance into more traditionally proletarian existences, find themselves assuming entirely different identities; as with Thomas, their dramas partly revolve around the question of distinguishing their authentic selves from the roles they have come to play.

Thomas’s own relationship to music is a varied one. On the streets, he listens to rock (the Kills’ minimalist lament “Monkey 23”) and propulsive dance tracks. He uses his headphones to shut out the world around him and to exorcise his more aggressive emotions—and, when necessary, to sharpen them for battle. But as a performer, Thomas is not yet proficient enough to lose himself in the music he plays. He must work to master a difficult Bach score, and the impression he gives of rapture at the piano comes across partly as a piece of acting, a way of psyching himself up to inhabit a maestro’s state of mind.

In the coda to The Beat That My Heart Skipped, set two years after the main action, we see how music has transformed Thomas. Whereas Fingers ends with Jimmy naked, alone, and seemingly having lapsed into madness, Audiard’s ending is more complex, and springs two surprises on us. First, we see an older Thomas who is now sober, maturely confident, and altogether at home at the keyboard and on the stage of a concert hall. Then, while calmly going about his new professional and personal duties, he spots someone in the street with whom he has unfinished business—Minskov, the man who was clearly responsible for Robert’s violent death. Thomas’s brutal, vengeful impulses are instantly triggered, eclipsing the cool control he seems to have mastered in his departure from the criminal world. In this moment, he has at last found the prospect of a different kind of fulfillment, an opportunity for the catharsis that has been denied him.

This closing sequence leaves us speculating about the protagonist’s future and sizing up what he has lost and gained. Many of Audiard’s characters find that success is inextricable from perdition, but Thomas’s fate is conveyed with perhaps the most acutely ambiguous of all conclusions in the director’s oeuvre: a troubling, dissonant end chord that hangs tantalizingly unresolved.