The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005, French) - The Piano Player who Shoots

French genre film is returning slowly with underground crime worlds being explored thoroughly by Audiard.

There's a certain rush you feel while watching a Jacques Audiard movie. His films are high on drama and implausibility but the charm lies exactly there. In Dheepan (2015), Audiard brings a Sri Lankan family to the underbelly of Paris and lets them figure out things for themselves to start a new life. In Read My Lips (2003), a docile woman with hearing issues is made to deal with her new assistant at work who's also an ex-convict. And in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a tough real-estate broker is made to play the piano like his mother used to. In every film of his, things at stake are huge but the reward is beyond anything materialistic.

What really makes this particular film special among the incredible filmography of Audiard is its audacity. Audacity to turn things on their heads and see where they go. Although a remake of James Toback's Fingers (1978), this film sets itself apart almost immediately by choosing a tone that's more tender and fragile. We feel the nature of things right away, as though something momentous were to happen at all points because the energy of the film is such. Romain Duris plays Thomas Seyr, a 28-year old shady realtor working for his father who, now, is retired and in the process of finding a young girlfriend for himself. Thomas' dreams are, at least were, to be someone else but he hasn't been brought up in an environment where those sort of dreams are welcomed. Each scene in the film gives us a gist of what it is like being Thomas and what he's been sacrificing. There isn't a backstory to explain this because the staging and performances are so good that we get the idea right away. The editor of the film, Juliette Welfing, cuts the film in such a way that we get to not just watch but experience Thomas' angst and his restless energy. She drifts through the film with a matter-of-fact approach, simply letting us know the details of this journey and trusting the actors to convey the emotions perfectly. And the result of it is the exact rush I was talking about earlier.

Jacques Audiard makes movies with crime lurking around at all times. The lives of his characters are precarious, always on the edge, but his movies are mainly about inconceivable relationships - two people who are to never meet, fall in love and be together, do all that and a bit more. They don't belong to the same worlds, have nothing in common but end up changing each other, mostly for better than worse, and this happens while adversity faces them. And it isn't that these characters are always the big players in the crime world. Sometimes, like in Read My Lips (2003) and Rust and Bone (2012), they are petty and small, the ones who have had the taste of it but don't have it in them to fully get-out. And in these gloomy moments comes a ray of hope, only to cause more mess at times.

Drama is intense in the filmmaker's work but he doesn't shy away from using it to his advantage. In fact, he loves it. What sets him apart from most filmmakers is his approach to this level of drama - matter-of-fact and sincere without being preachy. Sincere because instead of making a case-study out of his characters, he genuinely cares for these people in his films. The element of crime too is important here because it's the main source of the intensity, lending the energy to his characters to become more tender and fight for reasons that are right.

I will highly recommend this picture for its entirety. Everything in it is of great value - the story world, the performances, its incredibly smooth narrative, performances by the fabulous cast and of course, the exceptional score by Alexandre Desplat. Stephen Fontaine's camera work is lucid, without interrupting or calling for attention and perhaps one of the main reasons for these movies to work so well. French cinema, in general, offers countless genres at the moment but somehow, most of them revolve around love. They've been the masters of the love story but over the years, there's an edge to their storytelling; be it Gaspar Noe's extreme version of a revenge story in Irreversible (2002) or Leos Carax's fantasy filled Holy Motors (2012), there's a strong emotional core at the centre in each of these films that's driven by love.

If you get a chance to watch The Beat That My Heart Skipped at any time, do not miss it. Leave comments if you can and we could speak a little about what you thought of the film.