The Beat That my Heart Skipped

In this follow-up to his critical smash READ MY LIPS, Jacques Audiard has adapted and updated James Toback’s cult 1978 film, FINGERS, to come up with a gripping modern noir about a young man torn between a life of crime and classical music.

Romain Duris (L’AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE, LE DIVORCE), in a stand-out performance, portrays 28-year-old Tom, who seems destined to follow in his father’s footsteps as a Parisian property shark, lost in a sleazy and sometimes brutal milieu. But a chance encounter with his late mother’s music agent leads him to believe that he can become, like his mother, a concert pianist. In earnest, he starts preparing for the audition with the help of a beautiful, young virtuoso pianist who has just arrived from China. She doesn't speak a word of French; music is their only exchange. But pressures from the ugly world of his day job soon become more than he can handle...

Aided by co-writer Tonino Benacquista (who co-wrote READ MY LIPS), the expressive camerawork of Stephane Fontaine and a lush Bach/pop score by Alexandre Desplat (who also scored READ MY LIPS and GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING), THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED fuses two unlikely worlds into a stunning vision, featuring a menacing and dangerous Paris rarely seen on screen.

"THRILLING! Stirs up a delicious mixture of Alfred Hitchcock-style suspense, hard-boiled action and exquisite musical reflection!" Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“A raging gangster film with a marvelous cinematic conviction. As for Romain Duris’s performance you could light your cigar from it. Any more heat and it would curl and burn the celluloid itself.” Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

“One of the most memorable and striking character studies in recent French cinema. One of the rare European films that manage to mythologize the city turning present-day Paris into a place as bursting with edgy atmosphere menace as the New York of MEAN STREETS or the Los Angeles of CHINATOWN. A standout performance by Romain Duris who is fast becoming the most versatile French leading man of his generation.” Lee Marshall, Screen International