Skip It

"De battre mon coeur s'est arête" ("The Beat That My Heart Skipped") is a rare animal. It's a remake of an American film, James Toback's 1978 film "Fingers". It turns out that the French are no better at redoing an American film than Americans are at remaking French films. The story centers on a young punk named Jimmy, played by Romain Duris, in a young Harvey Keitel kind of role, minus the great acting and believable plot line. He is part of a gang of thugs that tosses squatters out of buildings and beats up innocent people whenever the opportunity arises.

Along the way we meet his thug mates, his ex-thug father, some women who appear to be no better than the men in this picture, and finally a young refined Chinese woman, played very quietly by Linh Dan Pham. She's so quiet that at times you want to take a swing at her to wake her up. This is one of those stories where a man's past exposure to culture is to serve as a bridge back to goodness. You've seen the story a thousand times. Bad boy sees the light back to virtue but the bad guys keep tugging him back into the muck. What to do. What to do. The biggest problem here is that at no time does the lead character exhibit even a scintilla of remorse or redemption, so we could care less about his mythical transition.

Director Jacques Audiard does a serviceable job keeping the story rolling along but just because it's rolling doesn't mean it's working. I kept waiting for something to grab me but instead it just meandered to the finish line, and what a finish line it is. A thoroughly unbelievable, nonsensical ending attempts to clean up the loose ends, and we are asked to root for this creep and to suspend all sense of reality.

In a way it's sort of reassuring that a French filmmaker fares no better than his American counterparts when attempting to adapt a film to his own culture. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. For years I shuddered at American remakes of foreign films. Now it's the people in France who get a chance to recoil from a copy of one of ours. "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" is a beat film that should be skipped.