Long before Jacques Audiard made the questionable (tone deaf?) Oscar-winning crime musical Emilia Perez, he played a different tune with The Beat That My Heart Skipped. This earlier work plays as a gritty crime story until our protagonist has an emotional pang of artistic lucidity. The film seems preposterous. A small-time hood working for his slumlord father suddenly has his heart set on being a concert pianist? Give me a break. But such delusion seems fitting for a film that would ultimately become Audiard’s breakthrough.
Even the title suggests interruption. What should have been to what has become. The synchronicity of mind and body for a pianist are tantamount and cannot be paired with demands of a criminal life. This is the dilemma Thomas (Romain Duris) faces. He’s the son of a pianist mother. She is deceased, and the promise he once showed as a pianist himself has been pushed away for reasons that are never made clear. Thomas is now part of a shady real-estate team that uses illegal means to roust tenants and squatters from properties. He’s a hamster on a wheel going nowhere. But when he spots his mother’s former manager one night it becomes an inspiration to rekindle his love for piano.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped begins with an inauspicious prologue as Thomas listens to his friend, Sami, talk about his aging father’s indiscretions and helpless decline as his caretaker. This is Audiard coyly manipulating us to empathize with Thomas, who we’ve just met and who seems disinterested, before pushing us into a rougher reality. The scene also set us up the film’s overall theme pertaining to Thomas’s relationship with his parents. We see Thomas as son to a hard-living father, or a wilted widower that favors promiscuity with catalog models. As for his mother, all we can glean is she suffered for her music. Though, being married to Thomas’s father could have been the true suffering.
For Audiard’s fourth feature, he was inspired to remake James Toback’s Fingers (1978) not as tribute to a film he loves but as an appreciation for the grit that favored New Hollywood cinema in the 1970s. Beat definitely feels of that ilk. Shot mostly at night along Parisian streets, the film flits between Thomas’s current malaise to a reeducation of the music that he once valued. In the process, Romain Duris provides a violent energy. Early frustrations playing the piano mirror roughing up a restaurant owner in debt to his father. It’s performative and nuanced, as is his appearance when he moves between real estate and tutoring sessions with a piano player. These choices allow Thomas to assume different identities: his true self and the role that he has come to play over time.
The intersection between what we manifest to what we have come to expect can present a crisis of identity. For Thomas, music was the transformative crutch. As a youth watching his mother play he likely experienced a growing confidence that faded with her passing. During the coda to The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Thomas is triggered when he spots someone who was ultimately responsible for killing his father, thus him committing himself entirely to music. It’s almost an affront to the course Thomas takes. His violent impulses eclipse his cool countenance. In this moment, he has one last opportunity at catharsis by not letting sleeping dogs lie. But where Thomas goes next is left unsolved. It is a beat that just hangs and does not skip.
The Blu-ray disc includes more than 90 minutes worth of special features. Most are archival programs with screenwriter Tonino Benacquista and film composer Alexandre Desplat; footage from the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005; deleted scenes and rehearsal footage; and the original Italian trailer. But the highlight is a new interview with Jacques Audiard explaining why he wanted to remake James Toback’s gritty Fingers for a French audience. He wasn’t looking to honor the film’s integrity but to improve what he saw were inherent flaws. Also, the illustrated leaflet features critic Jonathan Romney (Independent) “Out of Sync” essay and technical details.
Speculating about the future and what has been lost and gained during a short passage of time ties nicely with David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. Also released the same year as Audiard’s neo-noir (2005), it now brings the director’s oeuvre in the Criterion Collection to eight – if counting the DVD release of Dead Ringers, which is out of print. Not bad for a Canadian filmmaker who likes to mix psychological and physical terrors with the visceral.
But Cronenberg going from Videodrome and Scanners to offer up a slice of small-town Americana — what is going on here? And yet this film serves as an excellent depiction of character perception. Screenwriter Josh Olson deviates greatly from the original graphic novel which revolves around a café owner that becomes an overnight celebrity when he kills two armed drifters. Tom Stall’s (Viggo Mortensen) life is upended after being branded a hero. Little does his bucolic community know Tom’s current life is an illusion. Not even Tom’s family knows his true identity. Scene by Scene we see how Viggo Mortensen’s character cracks and his history of violence seeps through.
A History of Violence is a masterclass in built-up duplicity. A reckoning comes calling in the form of Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris, marred and murderous, looking like a grim specter coming to collect Tom’s soul). A long shadow out of the past, Carl knows Tom is really Joey Cusack, a mob enforcer who left a trail of bodies in Philadelphia and Joey’s brother Richie (William Hurt) on the lurch and unable to be a top guy.
At a brisk 96 minutes, Violence has no fat but it does offer more pulp than you’d fine in an orange. And just like Jacques Audiard achieves with The Beat That My Heart Skipped in offering a crisis of identity, David Cronenberg offers his own version of a man caught between the past and the present. Viggo Mortensen’s performance is matched with Maria Bello walking the tightrope as the doting wife who herself is repulsed and turned on by the man she thought she knew. Ed Harris’s introduction and the way he calls Tom by his real name feels like a gust of cold air making a wind chime swing. And we can’t overlook William Hurt. The man was icing on the call sheet. Shows up in the last act for ten minutes and totally kills. The man is stone cold funny as Joey’s “bro-heem,” a mobster bemused by his underlings’ incompetence in trying to complete the simple task of murdering his brother. Hurt snagged an Oscar nomination simply by chewing scenery, turning down niceties for gallows humor, and having an accent that would make John Malkovich’s Teddy KGB (from Rounders) split open an Oreo.
For a film that marked a David Cronenberg renaissance and a creative partnership with star Viggo Mortensen, A History of Violence remains an exclamation point for a director who veers towards the intrinsic nature of self. Cronenberg elevates what feels like a dime-store potboiler that could have been a Don Siegel or Walter Hill project in the 1970s. Of course it does have its share of awkward plotting – the story arc involving Joey’s son going from being bullied to a fit of rage like his old man is clunky and distracting. Even with this story stumble, the thriller remains as perceptive as ever and gets better with every re-watch.
This new Criterion release retains all the supplements found on the original 2009 Blu-ray, including David Cronenberg’s commentary where he elaborates on shooting various sequences and keen observations about Tom Stall’s body language. Other returning features are a short vignette comparing the domestic and international cuts of Violence and the hour long documentary Acts of Violence with clips and sound from actors Viggo Mortensen, Stephen McHattie and Greg Bryk (they play the two drifters), Cronenberg, cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, and screenwriter Josh Olson.
Olson sits down with writer-producer Tom Bernardo (Bosch: Legacy) in a new program where the two discuss the original graphic novel and how it evolved during the writing and production process. (Most interesting is to learn a supporting character that would have been played by an Oscar-winning actor was removed entirely.)
Criterion also includes an interview with Cronenberg and Mortensen conducted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014. Finally, the illustrated leaflet features critic Nathan Lee’s (Film Comment) essay “Dead in the Eye” as well as technical credits.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Grade: B
A History of Violence
Grade: A-
