Lewes Film Club - The Beat that my Heart Skipped

At the beginning of The Beat that my Heart Skipped we aren’t sure what the protagonist does for a living, as we see him negotiating with a dodgy character over which ‘pitch’ is whose. We are led to believe that he is a drug dealer. In fact, it’s worse than that. Tom, played by Romain Durais, turns out to be an estate agent. He sneaks rats into apartments of late-payers, smashes up properties so they can’t be squatted, and lays into a group of illegal immigrants who’ve sheltered in a derelict house, with a baseball bat. We soon learn that his behaviour is conditioned: his thuggish flash-Harry father is in the same business. We don’t like Tom: he twitches, sniffs his nose a lot, and constantly listens to techno on a large pair of headphones.

Then he bumps into an old associate of his mother’s, and we see his other side. He decides to reawaken his dormant musical talent, and arranges a piano audition with a famous conductor. He starts getting lessons from a Vietnamese pianist, and realises that he’s good: possibly as good as his mother was. His newfound ambitions, however, don’t fit well with his violent fly-by-night profession. The conflict between the two sides of his character drives the plot along, helped by a love-interest affair with one of his associates' wives. The film is entertaining enough, the score is brilliant and the post-noirish cinematography sets the mood just right. You just keep wondering: what were his parents doing together in the first place. DL