Ray Pride

James Toback's 1978 directorial debut "Fingers" is about as batshit crazy as it gets, a daring existential bleat with Harvey Keitel playing a confused young man, obsessed with music, aspiring to his mother's career as a concert pianist while breaking fingers for his mobster dad. Shot in a fury, filled with self-loathing, misogyny and misanthropy, it's a steely, Stygian cry from the depths of 1970s Manhattan, so wrong it's right. (In his script, the compulsive Toback wrote of his doppelganger, "One senses him at once cocky and on the border of dread, forever close to a break-out from his containment: into sexuality, violence, desperation, or music...") With "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (De battre mon Coeur s'est arête), Jacques Audiard, the 53-year-old French writer-director of "A Self-Made Man" and "Read My Lips" has made an audacious, magnificent variation on Toback's themes and a substantial improvement on its form, eliding much of the frightening sexuality (and the mother in a mental hospital) yet retaining much of the psychological fury. Audiard's own emotional precision is measured in the shots that keep close to his character's head and shoulders. The world is in motion, and the camera seems prepared to hide behind this bold young man in his rashest moments. In the Keitel role, Romain Duris, in the same black leather skin, heeled Chelsea boots and sneer all his own, projects an equally livid inner life as a Parisian real estate fixer who lives in a flux of fucking, fucking-over and essential fucked-uppedness. "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," kinetic, tender, as coiled as the blue smoke from a lingering gauloise, has beauty and thrills to spare. This is masterful filmmaking, but also a superb portrait of rage that must be explored at the risk of suffocation or death. Somewhere, Jean-Pierre Melville is smiling. 107m.

"The Beat My Heart Skipped" opens Friday at the Landmark Century.

(2005-07-19)

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