"THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED"

This French film from earlier in the year was one that got some jaw-dropping critical notice & one that I'd had my eye on renting for a while. A remake of a great American underground 70s film called "Fingers" (which starred a young, intense and wild-eyed Harvey Keitel), "THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED" came off as decent enough but a little underwhelming. I think it might have something to do with smirking star Romain Duris, who is supposed to be this would-be thug who roughs up real-estate squatters in Paris, but comes off instead like an effete and arty nightlife hound. He's torn between two legacies - that of his concert-pianist mother, who provided him him some (not all) of her musical gift, and that of his hoodlum, lecherous Dad. Though there's some good tension between the two DNA-provided worlds, I don't think Duris pulls off the unbalance quite the way Keitel did. His choice to follow one instead of the other has some pretty tragic consequences, which frankly I didn't see coming at all.

I like that the story's core is the same as in "Fingers", but so much of it has changed, including the addition of a "two years later" postscript. Emmanuelle Devos, who was so great in "Read My Lips", was barely present in this one, which is too bad because when I read about this film I got the sense that she was one of the two stars. That must've been some other movie. I guess I'd recommend "The Beat That my Heart Skipped" as a rental only, and then one only if you've seen everything else that's halfway decent. Then you might wanna consider watching this, OK?