Friday, November 11, 2005: Murmurs

Tonight I worked late, then ran down to the Capitol Theater to catch the one non-Cine-X film I saw of the entire festival: The Beat My Heart Skipped by Jacques Audiard.  (Officially, it's "The Beat That My Heart Skipped."  But, frankly, I just refuse to include so unnecessary and infelicitous a "that".)  I'd meant to see it in NYC, and wasn't about to miss it a second time.  Especially as this is bound to be the only screening in Olympia.  And I'm glad I made it, because the film was very good.  Still, some of the more effusive praise seemed rather overheated.
The film's a remake of an early Keitel vehicle, Fingers, directed by James Toback.  I saw the Toback film a few months ago, on DVD.  It's really great, if exceptionally odd, in that brazen way certain 70s films were.  It's the story of a two-bit thug with ambitions to a career as a classical pianist.  But while he obsesses over Bach at home, he carries an early boombox everywhere he goes, blasting the Shangri-Las, the Shirelles, &c., like a tic.  It's so obnoxious it becomes endearing.  And the music is great, just like it was in Mean Streets (and Scorpio Rising).  Audiard set his version in contemporary France, and substituted electronica for the Brill Building sound.  But otherwise, he maintained a disconcertingly odd fidelity to the structure and story of the original.  Whether or not it worked, or even made sense.  It was charming at first, but started to grate after awhile.  Especially when he remade scenes that begged for reconsideration.  The one really France-specific difference I really liked - that Audiard's character was a "real-estate broker" who evicted squatters - never got much attention.  But the most irritating part was how ... practical Audiard's character ultimately seemed.  Which is why a film that was powerful because it edged up on farce... became farce.  Oh well.  It still looked really good.  And it had its moments.  The Vietnamese (?) woman who played the piano teacher was excellent...