The Beat That My Heart Skipped

The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Opens Fri., July 29, at Harvard Exit

After watching the tribute to Harvey Keitel at the 1992 Telluride Film Festival, Oliver Stone and Keitel repaired to a restaurant where they and their disciples sat at opposite sides of a long table, like mirror-image replicas of The Last Supper with dueling Jesuses. We bystanders watched while Stone mercilessly razzed Keitel, mostly about his ridiculously over-the-top performance as a classical pianist/mobster in James Toback's 1978 cult film, Fingers. Evidently Stone only likes over-the-top when he's the one overdoing it.

This French remake of Fingers by Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips) is not over-the-top, and this makes it both superior and inferior to the original. The setting is artsy Paris, not the archetypal American noir town; the shades of night are more tasteful in their neon palette. Instead of sweaty Keitel still hung over from Taxi Driver violence, we get the imperially slim Romain Duris (L'Auberge Espagnole), attired kind of like a young Beatle. Duris' Tom is a bit jittery from one Galoise too many, but compared to the two-fisted Keitel, he's a fluttery lightweight, whether he's banging on the ivories or on his victims. This time, he's not a mobster but a sleazy real-estate entrepreneur who drives people out of apartments he wants to take over by loosing bags of rats, prying up floorboards, and roughing up squatters a little. Keitel's character would disdain him as effete.

The kid—and he's still teenagerish at 28—is torn between two legacies. His late mom was an ambitious musician, his dissipated but surviving dad a middling real-estate thug. Niels Arestrup is terrific as Tom's father, proudly sporting a rotting mane that he thinks proves he's still young and full of cum but only marks him as a ruin in progress, as does the much younger girlfriend he toys with. Tom's twitchy, soulful eyes betray his helpless love for the decaying reprobate—when asked to collect a debt for the old man by threatening a tenant, his emotional debt to dad ensures he'll do it.

But it goes against his grain. He's striving to escape the realty-scam game, even though its violence is more mildly Mamet-esque than gorily godfatherish. A chance encounter with one of his mom's colleagues reignites his neglected piano career, and suddenly he's obsessed with mastering Bach's Tocatta in E, tutored by an Asian immigrant (Linh-Dan Pham) who's more demanding than any mob boss. He also launches an affair with a friend's wife, but neither is particularly emotionally invested. He pours everything he's got into Bach.

Here's the problem with Beat: It's smarter and more plausible than the original, and lacks authentically pungent sleaze. Tom endlessly wriggles his fingers, no matter what else he's doing, attempting to get his body in sync with the music. Keitel's character was only ostensibly music-obsessed. His heart was in the sex and violence, a transparent projection of the narcissistic fantasies of writer-director Toback. The first movie wasn't about fingers at all—it should've been called Fists. Keitel wore a cheap, shitty dark mobster's jacket and a frilly white scarf to symbolize his double nature; Tom wears a really nice, sleek leather jacket that is one with his Hamletlike suit of solemn black. He's no damn hoodlum—he's not even Belmondo lovingly impersonating Bogart. His nature isn't really divided. He's on the side of Art. Keitel's character (and Toback) was on the side of Strange Butt and Kicking Ass.

Audiard's Beat is lovely and stylish. But it doesn't surpass Toback's Fingers because, being Parisian, it never even considers getting its hands dirty. (R) TIM APPELO

Lila Says
Runs Fri., July 29–Thurs., Aug. 4, at Varsity

Or, The Boy Who Cried "Slut!" This French import traffics in notions of sexual and ethnic difference, reaching across those divides in a poor Marseilles neighborhood gone predominately Arab, but it's awfully traditional at its core—and not very surprising in its wrapping. Chimo (Mohammed Khouas) and his late-teen cronies hang out all day with not very much to do in their dead-end lives. He's got a little talent as a writer, which explains his voice-overs, since Lila, based on a novel, is one of those "this is the story of how I wrote my novel" kind of movies. As with most of that body of literature, sex is the easiest and most obvious of motivating forces, and 16-year-old blond orphan Lila (Vahina Giocante) provides plenty of motivation with her arrival in the hardscrabble hood. She lives with some kind of horrid, lecherous aunt, who behaves more like a religious fanatic/pimp. Loose on the street, puttering around on her moped in very short skirts, Lila immediately begins cock-teasing Chimo with her very foul mouth. "This chick could start a fucking jihad," he grouses, but he's secretly interested (while his homies are more openly contemptuous).

Lila isn't exactly Romeo and Juliet in the slums; it's smaller than that, and the stakes feel lower. Director Ziad Doueira was on firmer ground, coming-of-age-wise, in his prior West Beirut, which had real '70s life experience to it. Here, the most interesting forces are those swirling around Lila and Chimo's familiar forbidden love—the satellite dishes in the narrow alleys, all turned east toward Al-Jazeera; endless Middle Eastern violence on TV; the Arab ghetto pride in underachievement; and the teens' ambivalence about 9/11 ("Since those fuckers blew up New York, they've messed it up here as well," one says).