July 28-August 3, 2005

movies

piano man: Romain Duris as Beat's ivory-tickling hood.

Faux Pas

Fingers remake puts a foot wrong.

by Sam Adams

Cultural exchange cuts both ways. Jacques Audiard's somber-hued film may be the rare French movie that remakes an American original rather than the other way around, but it also makes it clear why the sluices usually run one way. It's one thing for Hollywood to add juice to a clever import; another for Audiard to try and make sense out of James Toback's lurid, crazily inspired Fingers. In Toback's original, Harvey Keitel plays the offspring of a gangster and a concert pianist who is torn between the brute efficiency of his father's profession and the passionate self-expression of his late mother's. The split between masculine aggression and feminine beauty is as juvenile as it is sexist, but Toback gives his Freudian sketchbook conviction, if not credibility.

Audiard, whose previous movie was the similarly skewed thriller Read My Lips, is obviously of a cooler temperament than Toback. The Beat That My Heart Skipped is shot in dark, moody colors by Stéphane Fontaine, as opposed to Toback's lurid hues, where blood is the color of paint and vice versa. But the rational approach does the story no favors, merely providing unwanted space to reflect on its daddy's-a-gangster underpinnings.

It's too bad, since Beat is an accomplished production in most every way. As Thomas, filling the Keitel role, Romain Duris is a sullen, sexy brooder whose digits are in constant motion, as if he needed to make up for the fact that this version isn't called Fingers by constantly moving his. (It might be the most hand-intensive performance since Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy.) As Duris' father, here a disreputable real-estate speculator who's not above using violence to evict stubborn tenants, Neils Arestrup has a sad, sulking quality, like a slovenly bear, and Emmanuelle Devos, so recently astounding in Kings and Queen, exudes luminous opportunism as the father's skeptical girlfriend. But you never get the sense that the movie's central dilemma is more to Audiard and his co-screenwriter Tonino Benacquista than a handy schema. They don't believe Toback's bullshit.

The best addition to Audiard and Benacquista's script is Thomas' relationship with Miao-Lin (Linh-Dan Pham), a conservatory student who takes on the task of tutoring him despite speaking almost no French. Their near-wordless rapport, punctuated by his cries of frustration and her instruction "Again," creates the only moments when Beat is aided, not hampered, by emotional complexity, although it also foreshadows a totally bogus conclusion that underlines the filmmakers' lack of conviction. If, in the simplest terms, American filmmakers turn to French sources for philosophical depth, it's exactly the shallowness of his source that leaves Audiard hanging out to dry.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped Directed by Jacques Audiard A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse