22/02/2005

Jacques Audiard’s last film, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (That beat my heart skipped), in competition in Berlin, won many people’s approval. This film, a tribute to James Toback’s Fingers, is definitely a dark psychological movie where feelings and bodies intermingle under Audiard’s magistral direction.

Within the corrupted real-estate trade, Thomas has started his fall. As his dark clothes indicate, he has surrendered body and soul to the devilish pleasure of speculating and chasing hobos out of empty building with a baseball bat. One day, by chance, he meets the impresario of his mother, who was a pianist. Remembering the boy’s talent, he offers to audition him. Thomas starts dreaming of another life. Going back to music means meeting his origins again, communing with his mother’s depth and her love of life and rejecting his father’s corruption and violence. Romain Duris, in the role of Thomas, plays perfectly the deep ambiguity of his character, conveying both his innocence and his revolt, reminding us of young Delon in his italian period, as Audiard himself says, or of Al Pacino in The Godfather. The character’s revolt against his life and his father, his love of music, show his great energy, an energy which ends up turning violence and fear into joy and innocence again, thus allowing him to grow up. This black movie French-style belongs a tradition which includes Truffaut, or Deville. Audiard, like many contemporary film-makers in France (like Arnaud Desplechin, particularly in Roi et Reines), tackles the issue of paternity, as a metaphor to the origins of his art, and the quest for an identity within the history of French cinema. The film was produced by Why Not Productions, Sedif and France 3 Cinéma. Celluloid Dreams handles distribution in France, where it will be released on the 23d of March. Celluloid Dreams, which manages intenational sales, has already sold it to the United-Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Italie, and China...and of course, many agreements are in process in Europe and Russia, as well as in South America.

(Translated from French)