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Wednesday, May 31, 2006

This week at SFC: The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Thursday June 1st

All our screenings are FREE ones.

Film will commence at 8:15 pm. Doors open at 7:30 pm.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete)
(Jacques Audiard/France/2005/102')

French leading man Romain Duris makes his breakthrough as the charismatic antihero of this edgy noir thriller, directed by Jacques Audiard, based on the 1978 James Toback film Fingers. His performance, combining rage and vulnerability, bears comparison with De Niro's Johnny Boy in Scorsese's Mean Streets.

Duris plays Tom, a young guy who is making a good living in the violent and seamy world of speculative property development in Paris. He and his reckless gangster associates buy up freeholds and sell them on at a profit, having first brutally intimidated the sitting tenants into leaving. But, astonishingly, Tom has a dream: he wants to be a concert pianist like his late mother. Audiard pulls off the audacious trick of presenting Tom as a plausible split personality: wiseguy by day, would-be classical musician by night, practising obsessively. And Tom brings to the piano keyboard the fanatical anger, fear and control-freakery that he has built up during a tough working day in the semi-criminal jungle.

Like Michael Haneke in The Piano Teacher, Audiard cleverly shows how the rigour of classical piano is not a gentle conduit for artistic expression but an impossibly cruel taskmaster, codifying the dark side of human nature. It's an intriguing conceit from a fiercely energetic and involving thriller.

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