The wild beat of my heart

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Movie
German title The wild beat of my heart
Original title De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté
Country of production France
original language French , English , Standard Chinese , Russian
Publishing year 2005
length 107 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Jacques Audiard
script Jacques Audiard,
Tonino Benacquista
James Toback
production Pascal Caucheteux
music Alexandre Desplat
camera Stéphane Fontaine
cut Juliette Welfling
occupation

The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a feature film of French director Jacques Audiard from the year 2005 . The drama is a remake of James Toback's film Finger - Tender and Brutal (1978) and was produced by the film studio Why Not Productions in collaboration with u. a. Canal Plus produces.

action

The musically gifted 28-year-old Thomas Seyr, called “Tom”, gave up playing the piano after the death of his mother Sonia, a concert pianist. Ten years later he works for his father Robert as a "real estate agent" in Paris . He exposes rats in buildings, turns off water and electricity, and occasionally takes illegal immigrants, squatters or tenants who have become annoying on the streets with his friends.

When Robert wants to get married again, he gets his son's consent. Tom urges him to marry model Chris, but is afraid that his father will be disappointed. He mocks his young stepmother and calls her a "whore" to his father, who asks him for his honest opinion.

One evening, shuttling between crooked shops and the Parisian nightlife, Tom discovers an old friend in front of a concert hall out of his car. Monsieur Fox, who organized piano concerts for his mother Sonia, still vividly remembers the talented Thomas. He invites him to come over sometime and audition. Inspired by the thought, Tom listens to his mother's old tape recordings that same evening and begins to make music himself on the orphaned grand piano in his apartment. He begins to register for an audition at the Paris Conservatory and dreams of following in his mother's footsteps and becoming a concert pianist. During foreplay, however, even before he has proven his skills, Tom receives a rebuff from a music professor who thinks he is too old and too untalented to study. Tom receives little encouragement from his father for his new plans either. Selfishly, he is more interested in getting rid of a troublesome Tunisian with rent arrears who runs a restaurant across the street.

Only reluctantly, Tom accepts the assignment and uses force to obtain the money for his father, injuring his hand. Having become aware of the danger of his work, it is the last crooked business for Thomas that he does for his father. He hands Robert the Tunisian's outstanding money and asks him to be left alone from now on. But he immediately regrets his decision.

Tom is preparing for an audition with Monsieur Fox in the near future. Through a contact with a Vietnamese, whom he met during his unsuccessful audition at the music college, Tom got to the beautiful tutor Miao-Lin. Annoyed, Tom notices that the Asian only speaks standard Chinese and Vietnamese in addition to a few bits of English and is about to give up, but still agrees with Miao-Lin to practice with her every day from 2 p.m.

Tom soon internalized the music so much that in his free hours in the Parisian scene he lets his hands slide over the counter of a bar - like playing the piano.

Tom covers his married friend Fabrice, who is secretly cheating on his wife Aline, but he is increasingly neglecting the real estate business. He lets his aggressions and disappointments run free during music lessons with the pedantic Miao-Lin, but achieves initial successes despite the communication problem.

At the same time he starts an affair with Aline, Fabrice's wife, who knows about her husband's affairs. While Tom soon claims ownership of the beautiful Aline, he continues to practice in his home studio, teaching Miao-Lin French during his piano lessons.

Tom's father Robert, whose relationship with Chris came to an abrupt end, was shortly afterwards defrauded and beaten up by the Russian Minskov for 300,000 euros when he bought a property . Tom then turns to Chris with a proposal for a financial deal that will encourage her to return to Robert and rekindle the relationship so that she can keep Tom regularly updated on his father's health. Tom also tries to get his father's money back, but learns from Minskov's girlfriend how dangerous the Russian is. Tom then persuades his father to waste thoughts on the lost money.

The night before the audition, Tom and his friends have to drive squatters off a property again. The next day, while auditioning for Monsieur Fox, Tom's nerves fail and his career as a concert pianist is a long way off. When Tom visits his father shortly afterwards, he finds him shot dead in his devastated apartment.

Two years after his father's murder, Tom has a relationship with Miao-Lin, who has become a famous concert pianist. He was managing their tours when he met the Russian Minskov on a street in Paris. While Miao-Lin is holding the concert, Thomas follows Minskov with the aim of killing him. After a bloody argument in a neighboring stairwell, Tom is unable to shoot the unconscious man. He returns to the Miao-Lin concert, barely freshened up, where he watches her from his seat and re-enacts the piece with his fingers.

History of origin

The wild beating of my heart is a remake of the B-movie Finger - Tender and Brutal by James Toback. In the US director's debut film from 1978, Harvey Keitel played the lead role of the musically gifted casual crook. Toback's work quickly became a cult film and was one of the favorite films of François Truffaut (1932–1984) or Quentin Tarantino . The French director Jacques Audiard, who is also one of his favorite films , Finger - Tender and Brutal , adapted the work together with the writer and screenwriter Tonino Benacquista . Both had worked together on Audiard's thriller Sur mes levrès four years earlier . They transferred the action, which originally took place in the area of ​​the New York Mafia, to Paris and used the real estate business there as a profession. They kept Toback's premises, but made major changes to the script. Audiard and Benacquista introduced female figures and deleted the figure of the deceased mother, who only exists in the imagination of the protagonist. The character of the father, however, was hardly changed. Films by James Foley also served as inspiration for the script from Audiard and Tonino Benacquista , including Glengarry Glen Ross (1991) with Al Pacino , who is based in the New York real estate industry.

Romain Duris , who is considered one of the most talented young actors in France, could be won over for the main role of Tom . Audiard had pursued Duri's career since serving in Cédric Klapisch's senior year : Wild Youth - 1975 in 1994. In preparation for the shooting, Duris received piano lessons from his sister, a concert pianist. Duris was supported by Niels Arestrup , Linh Dan Pham and Emmanuelle Devos, among others . Devos had successfully starred in 2001 as the leading actress under the direction of Audiards in Sur mes lèvres . Linh Dan Pham celebrated her breakthrough in 1992 with her first film role in Régis Wargniers Indochine . For the Asian actress it was the first film role after a thirteen-year abstinence from the screen.

The Wild Beatles of My Heart was filmed on original locations in Paris, including in the Café Les Jardins d'Issoire on Rue de la Tombe Issoire. The industry-standard 35 mm film was used for the shooting . Stéphane Fontaine was hired as cameraman , who filmed every scene from the protagonist's point of view with a hand-held camera. The French film composer Alexandre Desplat , who had worked on Jacques Audiard's previous work, was able to be won over for the film music . Desplat based his search for the musical leitmotif on works by Johann Sebastian Bach . The French film editor Juliette Welfling , who has been involved in all of Audiard's previous feature films, was responsible for editing .

reception

Jacques Audiard's fifth directorial work premiered on February 17, 2005 at the Berlin Film Festival . The official French theatrical release took place less than a month later, on March 16. The film, which was generally classified in the genre of Neo-Noir (contrary to Toni Benacquista's opinion, who does not recognize any genre films in Audiard's works), was in the favor of critics and was able to attract almost a million viewers to cinemas in France alone. The focus was primarily on the dark and realistic, sometimes claustrophobic staging of Audiard compared to the original, as well as the unpredictable plot. The acting ensemble also received great reviews, especially lead actor Romain Duris. For his charismatic game of Tom , torn between music and crime , he has been compared with a young Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo or with Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy from Martin Scorsese's cauldron (1972). Negative voices attested the work, which was characterized by nervous camera work, weaknesses in the staging and a leading actor who would have oriented himself far too much on the style of Robert De Niro or Harvey Keitel. James Toback, who knew the cinematic work of Audiard, especially Sur mes levrès , praised the remake. But he criticized Tom's decision not to take revenge on the alleged murderer of his father. In the US, The Wilde Beatles of My Heart celebrated its premiere in five cinemas on July 1st, and by the beginning of December 2005 was able to bring in a profit of over one million US dollars. The film started in Germany on September 22, 2005 and received mostly good to very good reviews there too.

Reviews

  • Chicago Sun-Times : "The French film is not so much a remake as it deals with a variation of the same material, seen in a more realistic, less emotional, extreme way ... 'The Beating of My Heart' is a darker and more pessimistic proposition , with a hero who is just as conflict-laden but not as insane as the original Tobacks. "
  • film-dienst : “The style of the film is particularly impressive: Stéphane Fontaine's camera looks like the protagonist, always as if on the go, and the lighting evokes a kind of impressionistic film noir. It's definitely exciting to look at, but like so many études, it sometimes leaves you cold. Inside the film there is less of a heart than a metronome that has been artfully disrupted. "
  • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : “The film is a single power plant. He constantly converts a large amount of energy into other physical states. The aggressiveness that Tom drives is converted without loss as soon as he sits at the piano. "
  • New York Times : “Part psychological thriller, part love story (men and women, parents and children), 'The Wild Beating of My Heart' is also about what it takes to escape our own prisons. Written by Mr. Audiard and Tonino Benacquista, with whom he wrote 'Sur mes levrès', the film uses its gloomy environment as a kind of sneaking up in meditation on what makes us human, including the bonds that strangle us. "
  • Tagesspiegel : “The rare genre of the artist thriller, to put it mildly, does not experience any significant new impulses from 'De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté'. Just like the title finding - prosaically translated: My heart has stopped beating - is not immediately revealed. "

Remarks

  • After a conversation with his producer Pascal Caucheteux , Jacques Audiard had the idea of ​​remaking Finger - Tenderly and Brutally . Caucheteux, who had previously produced the film Das Ende - Assault on Precinct 13 by Jean-François Richet , a remake of John Carpenter's Assault at Night (1976), had asked Audiard which film he would remake if he could .
  • Thomas' headphones that he often wears during the film are the Sony MDR-V300 .
  • If the rights to Finger - Tender and Brutal had not been free, Audiard would have filmed Jacques Tourneur's B-movie The Curse of the Demon (1957), according to an interview with the daily newspaper Die Welt .
  • The original French title of the film alludes to the popular song La Fille du Père Noël by Jacques Dutronc .
  • According to the director, the scene in which Tom and his friends are exposing rats should illustrate the misery in the real estate industry - in his opinion real estate agents are also rats who go into eating each other alive.
  • The film features Johann Sebastian Bach's Fugue in E minor, which was used in the original by James Toback.

Awards

At the award ceremony of the most important French film award, the César , on February 25, 2006, Jacques Audiard's film was the big favorite in eight of ten nominated categories, including Best Film and Best Director. Previously, The Wilde Beat My Heart had already received a Silver Bear for Best Film Music at the Berlinale 2005 and had received the British Academy Film Award for best non-English language production in 2006. In the same year the drama was also awarded the French Syndicate of Film Critics' Prize.

César 2006

  • Best movie
  • Best director
  • Best adapted script
  • Best Supporting Actor (Niels Arestrup)
  • Best Young Actress (Linh Dan Pham)
  • Best film score
  • Best camera
  • Best cut
    • nominated in the categories
      • Best Actor (Romain Duris)
      • Best tone

British Academy Film Awards 2006

  • Best Non-English Language Film

Further

Berlinale 2005

European Film Award 2005

  • nominated in the categories
    • Best Actor (Romain Duris)
    • Audience Award - Best Director

Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma 2006

  • Best movie

Web links