French film

Hobbled to see De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete, clumsily translated as The Beat that my heart skipped (why not My Heart Skipped a Beat - at least it scans!) by Jacques Audiard - director of the brilliant Read my Lips two or three years ago. Went to one of my fav London cinemas - Curzon Soho. Unfortunately, the reviews have been good and the theatre was full of people sneezing and munching on popcorn (ugh). I intensely dislike full cinemas and people troughing on buckets of popcorn with bovine content.

Whatever.

The film is as good as the previous one: the main character is a Parisian commercial real estate wide boy with a dead pianist mother. He bumps into his mother's former manager which gives him the idea to take up the piano again. He hires the services of a Chinese non-french speaking woman to train his fingers on the keyboard after 10 years of wheeler dealing. Their silent hours at the keyboard together slowly pull him out of the hardball underworld of property dealing (where hands get scarred) to a graceful world of fingers stroking keys. Its interesting that the film is a remake of a 1970s film called Fingers: the hands are the locus of transformation from a nefarious life to a life of beauty.

A simple enough plot. What makes the film is the acting of the lead, Romain Duris. He looks like a lither, meaner Daniel Day Lewis, struggling to recover all that was lost when his mother died. On a deeper level, the film is an exploration of the relationship between memory and value, and how the way our hands interact with the world to a large part prescribes what kind of world we end up interacting with.