There’s a neat cyclical thing about The Beat That My Heart Skipped (poor grammar, but cute title). The French spit out high-Hollywood cinema as the nouvelle vague. The American counter-cultural turks run with it through the ‘70s. So Jacques Audiard’s French remake of James Toback’s 1977 debut Fingers is an intriguing cross-cultural prospect right from the get go.
Of course, it does put actor Romain Duris in the daunting position of Being Harvey Keitel when that really meant something.
Fingers, like much of Keitel’s work from the period (or indeed old buddy De Niro’s), forms a furious excavation of masculinity, though Audiard’s updating, while bubbling with testosterone, requires something a little more multifaceted from its hard man protagonist.
Like Keitel, Duris straddles the duality of the modern hunter-gatherer. By night, he works the muscle end of the property market, turfing unwanted tenants onto the streets and smashing hell out of inanimate objects or, when the need arises, other people. He fucks other men’s wives for sport and revenge, gets coked up, listens to techno and lunches with his scumbag father.
Then, on other occasions, he’s very much the son of his late mother. Like her, he has potential as a concert pianist, a gift he decides to nurture under the tender guidance of Chinese music student, Miao-Lin (Lin-Dan Pham). In the circumstances, it’s like learning Travis Bickle’s been doing ballet on the quiet.
Watching a gentleman carrying rabid rats as weaponry, then banging out Haydn pieces, suggests that youthful masculinity is a kind of psychosis one must conquer and Duris does incredible work conveying the madness and the contradictions, as does the director, whose deft touch carries a plot which might otherwise look schematic.
But jeez, boys are stupid.