1279-1280 Read My Lips / The Beat That My Heart Skipped

[domino harvey]

Read My Lips

Two outcasts are drawn together by crime and passion in this early tour de force from director Jacques Audiard. Carla (Emmanuelle Devos, who won a César Award for her performance) is an unappreciated, hard-of-hearing employee at a nondescript construction company. Her lonely life gets a jolt of excitement when she hires a new assistant: Paul (Vincent Cassel), an ex-con who soon enlists her (and her lip-reading ability) in a risky scheme. With visceral camera work and sound design, Audiard immerses viewers in the duo’s increasingly turbulent world, blending noir conventions with complex character development for a thriller of unique depth and emotion.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Jacques Audiard and director of photography Mathieu Vadepied, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
New afterword by Audiard
Audio commentary with actors Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos
Program about the making of the film featuring interviews with Audiard, Vadepied, and coscreenwriter Tonino Benacquista
Interview with composer Alexandre Desplat
Deleted scenes featuring commentary by Audiard
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau

New cover by Century

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

A riveting character study in the guise of a gritty underworld thriller, Jacques Audiard’s international breakthrough features an explosive performance from Romain Duris as a real-estate broker torn between the dirty dealings of his slumlord father (Niels Arestrup) and his recently rekindled love for classical piano. Can music offer salvation from a life of sin? Winner of eight César Awards, including Best Film, this bold reimagining of the New Hollywood cult classic Fingers showcases Audiard’s gift for balancing breathtaking tension with galvanic human drama.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

High-definition digital master, approved by director Jacques Audiard, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
New interview with Audiard
Interviews with coscreenwriter Tonino Benacquista and composer Alexandre Desplat
Press conference from the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, featuring members of the cast and crew
Deleted scenes featuring commentary by Audiard
Rehearsal footage
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film critic Jonathan Romney

New cover by Century

[aox]

I haven't seen The My Beat Heart That Skipped, but it sounds incredible.

[domino harvey]

I watched it a couple years ago as part of the ever in the background Cesar awards project (where it won best picture), I enjoyed the logical yet unexpected turn of the ending but wasn't too impressed by rest of it. Haven't seen Toback's original film to compare, though

[aox]

I watched it a couple years ago as part of the ever in the background Cesar awards project (where it won best picture), I enjoyed the logical yet unexpected turn of the ending but wasn't too impressed by rest of it. Haven't seen Toback's original film to compare, though

Thanks for the earnest post.

My post was moved to this thread, but it was a joking comment in the cover critique thread about the cover design announced today.

[tenia]

I watched it a couple years ago as part of the ever in the background Cesar awards project (where it won best picture), I enjoyed the logical yet unexpected turn of the ending but wasn't too impressed by rest of it. Haven't seen Toback's original film to compare, though

I've seen it originally with some friends in theater when I was in prep school. I don't think any of us was into this kind of movie at that time, so we weren't so fond of it, but it stuck with me. I watched it again years later, and I still think it's one of the better Audiard (which, depending on how much you like his filmo, might not say much). But it does kind of not know what it wants to be, and it hinders the movie somehow. In the end, yeah, you get it but then, well, the movie's over.

Read My Lips has the same issue, though I didn't like it so much. It's a bit too long at pretty much 2 hours, its last act in particular being tedious to wrap up. And while I do think Cassel and Devos are very good in it, they don't have much chemistry, despite the movie's plot relying in part on it. Not a bad movie, just one that could have been better, and also suffer at times from wanting to be too many things at once instead of being very good at less things.

[domino harvey]

It's too bad they weren't able to include an extra with Duris. Criterion keeps releasing films starring extremely well-known actors in France who are comparatively lesser known here and then furthering the issue with ignoring them for extras (though, to be fair, perhaps they tried and couldn't make it work, over and over)

[Zot!]

Score. These are the two best Audiard movies....after that I like A Prophet and loathe everything that followed, and he turned into the French Baz Luhrmman. I actually don't remember what I thought of Fingers, but I remember this stripped the artifice of Toback's original down to a fun little thriller. I will happily buy both of these.

No 4k for Beat My Heart Skipped? Yeah, I double checked on their site and it is indeed Blu only. Kind of a weird pair in this manner.

[Matt]

I never thought I would see the day! Beat is a Wellspring rescue. Keep 'em coming. It was probably finished in 2K with a digital intermediate, making a 4K release unfeasible. I like the movie a lot, but I'm aware that I'm in the minority here. I think Criterion is overselling Beat with the words "riveting," "explosive," "breathtaking," and "galvanic." I think of this film more as a slow burn character piece with, like A Prophet or Rust and Bone, a couple of tension-breaking bursts of action.

Read My Lips was a Magnolia release but the DVD came from Sony Pictures Classics. I think it's a stone-cold modern crime film classic.

[domino harvey]

I never thought I would see the day! Beat is a Wellspring rescue. Keep 'em coming. It was probably finished in 2K with a digital intermediate, making a 4K release unfeasible.

It also had an English friendly Blu from Artificial Eye, but it’s been OOP for a while now

[Zot!]

I like the movie a lot, but I'm aware that I'm in the minority here.

Other than the mixed reaction from forum members here this has very positive reviews, and kind of catapulted Audiard’s career.

[feihong]

Audiard seems like a disaster nowadays, but I loved these two movies, and still do. Read My Lips is remarkable to me as a surreal crime thriller that evolves out of the milieu of office work. I thought Devos and Cassel had an exceptional charge together, with attachment growing out of incredibly grubby, thorny circumstances. In one sense it's a fantasy about freeing oneself from the pressure and burden of work, and as such is richer than most thrillers.

The Beat My Heart Skipped and Fingers both get at the fetid hothouse mindscape of being a serious, or at least, semiserious musician. I'm a pianist, so maybe I get more out of these movies than some? The Piano, The Piano Teacher, these two...this particular kind of film is very much my jam, a kind of romantic fantasy of need, drive, artistic frustration, anger––dramas of the way if feels to be trapped in your own head with music––Occurence-at-Owl-Creek-Bridge-like thrillers about the tantalizing, terrifying gap between your pianist's intention and your finger hitting the "right" note. That might sound too florid. But I think all of these films get at the interior nightmarescape of the would-be musician's mind very effectively (perhaps The Piano is the happiest of these films, ultimately?) Being a musician is a dark, horrible experience that claims you, murders you, and is always trying to reanimate you afterwards; not the garbage piano magic Kiyoshi Kurosawa tries to push on us in Tokyo Sonata or Journey to the Shore (a movie I otherwise kind of like).

I don't think these two Audiard films need more qualification. They're exceptional.

[Rupert Pupkin]

I really don't like the artwork of these two releases. But this is great news, now J.Audiard in the Criterion collection makes more sense that only with "Dheepan".

I would have liked a "back to back" edition with James Toback "Fingers" like Criterion did for "The Killers". I would die to see "Fingers" restored properly in 4K (a WEB release is around and not that bad).
Toback wrote the screenplay of one of James Caan best movie (with Thief IMHO) : "The Gambler" (1974) - only an average Australian Blu-Ray is out.
This is one of the best movie about compulsive gambling (like "Straight Time" was for robbery)- there's the end of Asphalt Jungle which was remade by Melville for the end of Bob le Flambeur; The Dostoïevski theme as been used by Woody Allen for Match Point (Woody Allen even re-used the same opera theme when James Caan character visits his grand father and the basketball game seems like the tennis with the ball falling in the wrong side fate; wonder if Woody Allen has seen this movie).

"Fingers" is a masterpiece, Harvey Keitel's version of "Taxi Driver" with the final implosion. The dialogue with the jukebox was one of the great thing of Tobak's movie with Tisa Farrow, and too bad that Audiard did not use it that well.
The thing with both movies - especially Toback's movie, is that you can't believe that it's Harvey Keitel playing in its appartement (you could guess it's the tape running backward on his hi-fi player) whilst the piano lessons looks like it's Romain Duris who is playing (which are "new" on J.Audiard movie with the relationship with the young asian teacher (then again a WKW influence on J.Audiard which is a die hard fan for WKW movies)
Tanya Roberts's pool sequence has been replaced with a more discreet scene with Mélanie Laurent. I know it's hard to use close-ups on a keyboard a make us believe that it is the actor playing (I have in mind La Pianiste (which works well and Claude Chabrol's "Merci pour le chocolat").
Niels Arestrup presence makes me think that if one movie should miss in the Criterion edition it's "Un Prophète" : I won't say I like J.Audiard for some reasons I don't understand but I have seen this movies like 20 times, so it must be somehow "good" : the prison scene is like the act of Michael Corleone on Godfather part 1 at the restaurant, and we discover an amazing actor with Tahar Rahim. This is one of the best French movie of the decade.
His best movie IMHO. And one of Niels Alstrup's best movie (recently three great movies about Corse : "À son image" (an almost Antonion'esque portrait de femme), "Borgo" (with a great Hfsia Herzi) and "Le Royaume".

His last great movies (he cowrote the screenplay with Céline Sciamma) is "Les Olympiades" : I heard him at France Culture several years ago and he was obsessed by WKW, I guess that the cellophane that the asian girl wrap around her body comes from WKW (or J.J Beneix's Diva ?) - and he wanted to do a b&w movie with sex scenes like in Spike Lee b&w movie.
Then I guess he's got kind of lost...

[Matt]

It's always fun to have different versions of a film on the same release, but I can absolutely understand Criterion not wanting to platform James Toback in any way. Despite being an adaptation of an earlier film, Beat absolutely stands on its own.

[tenia]

"My heart skipped" definitely does stand on its own, but that's not why Fingers is unlikely to get platformed anywhere soon (quoique : Richard Stanley's Hardware is getting some new video releases here and there). These are 2 completely separate topic, even more so now that Toback has been ordered to pay a whopping $1.68bn to 40 of his accusers, over a total of almost 400 women having reached newspaper to say Toback sexually harassed them.

[Lowry_Sam]

I saw both in the theater when they were released (in the US). I was blown away by Read My Lips. Its use of sound to simulate the perspective of someone with a hearing impairment was quite refreshing. The only other post millenial drama (not scifi or adventure) whose sound design really impressed me for its uniqueness and effectiveness in furthering the story is Hukkle. Because of its refreshing creativity, I had high hopes for The Beat That My Heart Skipped but was a bit disappointed. I didn't feel the followup was a bad movie, but rather an okay follow up that could have been better with more attention to either the writing or the editing.

[The Curious Sofa]

The sound design of Read My Lips is great and the Alexandre Desplat score, one of my favourite scores of the 21st century, is the cherry on top.

[jbeall]

I haven't seen Read My Lips, but I thought The Beat That My Heart Skipped was excellent, and Niels Arestrup does great work with Audiard.

I always thought Dheepan was (far) lesser Audiard, and if Criterion can't get the rights to A Prophet, I'm glad they're putting out Beat... and an early one I haven't seen.

[Rupert Pupkin]

"Read My Lips" is perhaps IMHO the best J.Audiard next to "Un Prophète" even if I tend to find that it is perhaps 20 minutes too long; but it's a very good movie, thus I won't complain.
I saw it in theaters when it came out.
The way to film gestures, tenderness are perhaps inspired by WKW (slow mention, open to dark focus) and J.Audiard re-used this way of filming in some scenes of "Un Prophète".

Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos are amazing. I think that it is Emmanuel Devos best role ever (I wonder if she won best actress at the César for this movie, I'm not sure anymore) - if you saw her in "Comment je me suis disputé..." you will be somehow surprised.
I think that it was J.Audiard best achievement for a movie about a young woman, clumsy, insecure, but with a kind of dark side, a bit manipulative, but not like a femme fatale, even if - like the old dark femme fatale movies, she will gain progressively confidence and "féminité" - until the tenderness encounter between two "outsiders" ?
It's somehow funny (at the beginning - there is a kind of reference to F.Truffaut (the ANPE recruitment), and as tense as "Beat"...
You can't be wrong with the rest of the cast.
I don't have in mind some other movies with ear-impaired with "reading lips" (besides 2001 8-[ - all movies that I have in mind where used to be like horror / high-tense movies like "Témoin Muet".

[Lowry_Sam]

I don't have in mind some other movies with ear-impaired with "reading lips" (besides 2001 8-[ - all movies that I have in mind where used to be like horror / high-tense movies like "Témoin Muet".

There was Sound Of Metal, but for some reason I didn't find it as compelling as most people (I found it just okay), perhaps because I saw it soon after having watched Whiplash, which I loved.

[bdsweeney]

Has anyone read anything anywhere else that suggests that the master for The Beat That My Heart Skipped will be any different from/an improvement upon Artificial Eye’s 2016 release?

[Zot!]

Has anyone read anything anywhere else that suggests that the master for The Beat That My Heart Skipped will be any different from/an improvement upon Artificial Eye’s 2016 release?

I'd have to guess it will be from the same 2k DI, so probably not...I forgot it existed and is oop, but the screenshots from the AE look very nice.

It also should be noted that the "A Prophet" Blu from Sony is also already very nice, and has a reasonable amount of extras, so pretty definitive unless a 4k disc comes along, unless this is another 2k DI situation.

[Sloper]

The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a top-five favourite for me. Its relationship with Fingers is fascinating, but a dark rabbit-hole to go down. After re-watching Toback’s film in the light of the allegations against him, and then re-listening to his commentary track, I came away with the sense that Fingers is an evocation of his own mindscape, and as such – for all its artistic quality, and although Keitel’s performance is incredible – the film is horrifying. But I think this is an interesting way into explaining what I like so much about Audiard’s remake. I’ll spoiler tag the rest – and give a trigger warning, because there is some discussion of rape here.

Spoiler

Both films are Oedipal dramas about a protagonist who is defined in relation to his sleazy-gangster-father and disturbed-artist-mother, and who struggles to assert his own identity or form satisfying relationships. It’s interesting that tenia says Beat doesn’t know what it wants to be, because I think the big difference between these two films is that the remake has far more clarity and is more of a ‘well told story,’ whereas the original is freer and more exploratory, in a way that leaves you unsure of where it’s heading at any given moment. I could understand some viewers preferring the Toback film for that reason, but for me it’s also symptomatic of the way he seems to be using Fingers to spasmodically work out (or just manifest) his own hang-ups, in ways that are sometimes disingenuous and self-exculpatory.

The most disturbing scene in Fingers is the one where Jimmy (Keitel) tries to intimidate Riccamonza, the powerful gangster who has been screwing over Jimmy’s dad. Spying on Riccamonza at a health club, Jimmy calls him from a nearby payphone and threatens him, then he follows Julie (Riccamonza’s girlfriend) into the changing rooms and tries to chat her up by saying that he wants her ‘pussy’, which he tells her is ‘silk’. She rebuffs him and goes to the toilet; he follows her and rapes her. Rape is the word for it, because she says no and tries to get away from him, but when he forces himself on her she starts smiling, caressing him, and as Toback phrases it on the commentary track, ‘allows herself to get into it, being a horny, erotically driven girl by nature.’ Toback also says that it was Keitel’s idea to play this scene as though the sex were physically painful and difficult for him, whereas he (Toback) had conceived of it as a more purely pleasurable act. After Jimmy has orgasmed, he reveals that he did this to get at Riccamonza, and Julie becomes angry at him for deceiving her. As he leaves, Jimmy ruefully tells her that his beef is with the gangster, not with her: ‘You are silk,’ he says. Immediately after this, on the street, we see Jimmy cheering up a weeping homeless woman, which I think is supposed to make him seem sympathetic in an endearingly strange way.

Because of his father, Jimmy puts himself in danger, antagonising Riccamonza and forestalling any possibility of a real relationship with Julie (because he deceives her, not – from Toback’s perspective – because he rapes her). His mother’s influence is harder to pin down: she appears in one scene when Jimmy visits her in the mental hospital, and she demands a kiss on the mouth and reviles him for failing his audition. I think she is the source of his artistic sensitivity (to music of all kinds) but also of the pathological dimension to this sensitivity, the compulsive tape-playing and finger-tapping. Perhaps we’re supposed to think that his mother is the reason why he ‘recognises’ Julie as ‘silk’, but also the reason why he experiences sex as agonisingly painful? (I’m hesitant to work too hard at understanding some of this stuff…) Although Toback does not recognise Jimmy’s sexual act as rape, I think there is a kind of suppressed awareness here, and in other sex scenes throughout the film, that some form of abuse is occurring. The brevity of the mother’s appearance is telling: the incestuous relationship is referred to, but quickly moved on from; sexual abuse is a haunting presence that pervades the film but keeps being glossed over.

We see this in even more complex terms in Jimmy’s relationship with Carol and her relationship with Dreems, the Jim Brown character. When Jimmy forces himself on Carol, Toback comments that she ‘kind of lures him into it, and she clearly gets off too’; later she chooses to stay with Dreems in spite of his abuse, and Toback explains that this is ‘part of the dark complications of Jim and herself that she's playing out.’ Jimmy witnesses these ‘dark complications’ from a distance but cannot understand or intervene; the impulses that drive his own self-destructive behaviour are also ‘dark complications’ that cannot be spelt out or controlled. He seems like a helpless figure, pathetically dependent on those around him to determine what he will do next. Julie is ‘erotically driven by nature’ so Jimmy is just fulfilling her inherent nature; Carol lures him into sex, and she is the one actively ‘playing out’ the dark complications of her relationship with Dreems (when he abuses her). At one point, Jimmy says to Carol, ‘I need you to want me. If you don’t want me, I can’t do anything!’ Compare that with this account from one of Toback’s accusers:

During our first meeting, he requested that I masturbate for him. When I declined, he lectured me about how my refusal was representative of a lack of trust and how he had failed me as a director. “You see, what I need to get you to understand is that I will never ask you to do something that you are going to say ‘no’ to, because if you say ‘no,’ then I have failed. I have failed as a director, and therefore, I have failed as a person.” He gave me this lecture on more than one occasion. On the surface, it seemed like he was being respectful of my choices, when, in reality, he was a manipulative monster.

If you’ve ever dealt with someone like this, you’ll know the paradoxical feeling of being totally responsible for them and yet totally in their control. This is key to understanding what Fingers is about – feihong gave a great description of how both these films portray that sense of the fingers not quite doing what the brain tells them to, but in Toback’s film I think this extends to the portrayal of Jimmy as a passive creature, a bunch of flailing digits, at the mercy of other people (from his parents on down) but with no responsibilities towards anyone else. His two major acts of violence are both carried out on behalf of his father, and I think it’s interesting that in order to kill Riccamonza at the end, he has to first provoke him into almost killing him – Jimmy has to be forced into the act of killing.

The best scene in Fingers is the one where a fellow diner in a restaurant complains about ‘Summertime, Summertime’ blaring out of Jimmy’s radio. The fury with which Jimmy responds is beautifully played by Keitel. The father backs him up in this fight, and is for most of the film a great deal more genial with his son than Arestrup is in Beat. But in this scene, it is painfully obvious that Jimmy’s rage is being displaced; beneath the smiles that are passing between him and his father is a repressed fury that cannot be articulated directly, so it flares up in this encounter with a stranger. Again, this feeds into the overall picture of Jimmy as a victim of incomprehensible emotions that have been instilled in him by unwittingly toxic parents. He is driven to violence (whose object is, from the film’s point of view, always ‘asking for it’) only because he has no other legitimate outlet. I don’t necessarily mind a story about a character who is helpless and passive, but in this case it feels like there is a very creepy agenda behind this, tied up with Toback’s fucked up conception of his own behaviour.

Let’s go back to the health club sequence as Audiard re-imagines it. His version clarifies the purpose of this scene both in terms of plot and character development, while also making it less offensive – arguably it’s still problematic, but I think this is part of the film’s self-aware ambiguity about its protagonist, and worlds away from what we get in Toback’s version.

As before, Thomas spies on the gangster (Minskov) at the health club and calls him from a nearby phone. He immediately discovers that Minskov cannot speak French and starts recklessly threatening him in a mix of French and English. I love the way Duris delivers the line, in English, ‘If you do not give my father his money, I kill you mother-fucker, I kill…’ – and he stops to smile reassuringly at the concerned health club patrons walking past him. This comic-suspenseful moment, combined with Desplat’s brooding score and Minskov’s slow-motion brush past Thomas, communicates several things: Thomas is expressing a rage he does not fully understand, for which he does not have any language, but over which he has some – though limited – control. He is placing himself in danger but also threatening someone else, and the threat feels more credible here than in Fingers.

Then Thomas follows Minskov’s girlfriend on her way to the changing room. He tries to stop her from walking away, and she eventually raises a hand and says, ‘Don’t touch me,’ threatening to get Minskov to kill him. At that point Thomas backs away but tries to condescend to her, telling her that she is dating Minskov ostensibly for the power this gives her, when in reality she is terrified of him. None of this works, and she goes into the changing room. Thomas checks to make sure no one is around, then follows her in. At this point, especially if we’ve seen Fingers, I think we’re supposed to be nervous about what Tom is doing, and how far he will go in harassing this woman. He knocks on her cubicle door and she impatiently tells him to leave. But he starts talking to her, less condescendingly and more empathically, asking her questions about herself, insisting that he wants to get to know her. We cannot hear her responses, but she evidently ‘softens’ and begins confiding in him. He says he can’t hear her, so he goes into the neighbouring cubicle and starts climbing over the partition – when he tells her to make way for him, she tells him to stop but laughs as he clumsily falls into her cubicle. The scene ends here, and we next see Tom explaining to his father that Minskov is too dangerous to be meddled with, and that he has learnt this by having sex with Minskov’s girlfriend.

Audiard’s portrayal of abusive and coercive behaviour (here and in See How They Fall, Read My Lips, and Dheepan) is not beyond critique. I get the sense that he prides himself on dealing with these and other themes in a way that is never fully comfortable for the audience, and there’s a case to be made that he sometimes just feeds into problematic discourses. (I haven’t worked up the courage to watch Emilia Pérez yet.) In this scene in Beat, we see a man harassing a woman and repeatedly approaching her against her will. The woman’s laughter (as in Fingers) could be taken as a disingenuous way of glossing over the coerciveness of Tom’s actions, as in ‘It’s okay because she ends up liking him.’ It also has to be said that this is one of those male-authored films where every single woman the protagonist encounters is attracted to him…

But I think there is a lot more going on here. In a sense, Tom is behaving in a way he thinks his father would approve of. More clearly than in Fingers, the dad here is portrayed as a sleazy womaniser who objectifies his girlfriend (played by Emmanuelle Devos, and a much more fully realised character than in the original) and treats her badly. But Tom is also channelling his mother’s sensitivity by expressing empathy for another person. In this version, his mother is dead and there is no hint of an incestuous relationship. I think the veiled implication is that she took her own life, and it is certainly implied that the dad wasn’t much help to her once her mental illness became severe.

‘The emotion is not very generous,’ says the mother of her own piano-playing on one of Tom’s cassettes. In Toback’s film, listening to or playing music comes across as a kind of frenzied way of repressing emotions. I think Jimmy fails his audition because his emotions are getting harder to repress, so he cannot control the keys, and I think this has something to do with why his mother recoils from him in the next scene. But Tom’s mother is trying to access and express her feelings, as generously as possible, and she cannot play the piano because – recalling feihong’s post again – she cannot transmit her emotions into her fingers. When Tom fails his audition, this is so much more painful than the equivalent scene in Fingers, even though it is almost a shot-for-shot remake. He is most fully like his mother in this moment, having reached a nadir where the contradictions of his life, his job, and his relationships are creating such an intense turmoil inside him that he cannot begin to express this through a Bach toccata. Instead of running to his mother, as Jimmy did, he runs to his father, and finds him with his brains bashed out. We see Tom reacting to this in an intense close-up. He seems fully, viscerally in touch with all the emotions of this discovery, his hand pressed against his lips as he tries not to vomit, his fingers trembling as though playing invisible piano keys.

So in the earlier scene, when Tom tries to connect emotionally with Minskov’s girlfriend, he is to some extent pursuing that ‘generous emotion’ his mother strove for as an artist. This aligns with the way he interacts with other women in the film: we see him trying out different ways of relating to them, trying to establish meaningful connections based in mutual affection and respect. But importantly, this is not a mawkish film about a toxic dude who learns the error of his ways and makes good. Even when he speaks kindly to Minskov’s girlfriend through the cubicle door, he is still manipulating her and putting her in danger, and he is still acting on his father’s behalf. He empathises with her vulnerable position in relation to Minskov, but he also takes advantage of it. When he recounts this incident to his father, he simply says, ‘I fucked Minskov’s girlfriend.’ The dad responds with dismissive contempt, but I think we sense that Tom is more disgusted by his own sleazy behaviour (as when he sleeps with his friend’s wife) than by his father’s disappointment.

Tom’s relationship with Miao Lin, his piano tutor, is ostensibly his most ‘healthy’ relationship, the happy ending to which his redemption arc leads. But there are hints that Miao Lin may resemble Tom’s mother in more ways than her musical talent. None of her dialogue is translated, so the relationship between her and Tom is founded on strong emotions that neither can really express. When she yells at him during one of their lessons, her anger seems fully justified, but the intensity of her emotion may hint that she is troubled in the same way Tom’s mother was. In the car at the end, he asks her if the record label people were nice to her, and he massages her neck to soothe what is obviously a persistent problem. These are subtle touches, but they may indicate that Miao Lin has problems of her own, and that she is more than just a ray of sunshine who comes into Tom’s life to redeem him.

More importantly, being attached to him is not necessarily good for her – indeed, he may be to her what his father was to his mother. He manages her career, no doubt because he is good at strong-arming people when necessary, but by the same token he is still doing the work of his father. In Fingers, Jimmy goes straight from his father’s corpse to track down and kill Riccamonza, as if in automatic response. Tom does nothing to seek revenge for two years, then when he sees Minskov on the street, he chooses to follow him rather than get to Miao Lin’s concert on time. And then, having overpowered and (as in Fingers) castrated Minskov, he puts the gun in the gangster’s mouth…but doesn’t pull the trigger.

Again, this shows Tom has a degree of self-control, but it also results in a much more unsettling ending than Toback’s. Keitel sitting naked by his window, stained with Riccamonza’s blood and staring wildly into the camera lens, is a striking image, but there isn’t much reason to worry about Jimmy’s fate here. If the gangsters catch up with him and kill him, it seems like he would regard that as a mercy. When Tom, having hastily rinsed off the worst of the blood, walks into the concert hall halfway through the piece that Miao Lin is playing, and sits down and starts moving his bloodied fingers on his lap, and she looks out into the audience and sees him there, and he looks back at her with those proud, gleaming eyes…and we cut to the end credits as the music (Brahms’ Rhapsody no. 2) is at its most ominous… Next to Sunset Boulevard, this is the most wonderful shivers-down-the-spine ending I’ve ever seen. The emotions are so generous and so varied: Tom has achieved a kind of redemption by refraining from killing Minskov and attaching himself to Miao Lin; but he has also castrated a powerful gangster (who may be able to identify him) and left him alive, and there is no reason to feel secure about his fate or Miao Lin’s after the film ends. Unlike Jimmy, he is not alone, and unlike Jimmy, he and Miao Lin have so much to lose.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped captures the same sense of being doomed by your environment that Toback is going for, but in a way that re-affirms the protagonist's sense of responsibility rather than dissolving it in a miasma of victim-blame and rape myths. In the end credits, the Brahms piece is interrupted by The Kills’ ‘Monkey 23’ (‘There’s a monkey on my back, makes me act like that’). Tom cannot escape his parents' influence, for better and for worse. But the film revolves around his dawning struggle to come to terms with what makes him ‘act like that,’ how his actions affect others, how he can navigate the different aspects of his parents’ influence to reach some kind of equilibrium, where he does a job that isn’t despicable and relates to others in a way that isn’t exploitative. He doesn’t fully succeed, because again this is not a sentimental feel-good film, and Audiard is never interested in making his characters ‘likable’ in any conventional sense. The film is not telling the audience how to live a good life. It just portrays, very honestly I think, how it feels to try and live a good life.

[Jerion]

The contrast you draw between Fingers as a kind of raw personal expression and Audiard’s film as a more deliberate response is sharp, especially considering how the remake gains weight through its distance from Toback’s worldview.

And yeah, Fingers is definitely harder to watch now, given the context. On a related note about shifting perspectives, this guide https://gowithguide.com/blog/tourism-in ... guide-5275 is an interesting read on how cultural tastes evolve across borders.

[The Curious Sofa]

"[

Spoiler

b]Read My Lips[/b]" is perhaps IMHO the best J.Audiard next to "Un Prophète" even if I tend to find that it is perhaps 20 minutes too long; but it's a very good movie, thus I won't complain.
I saw it in theaters when it came out.
The way to film gestures, tenderness are perhaps inspired by WKW (slow mention, open to dark focus) and J.Audiard re-used this way of filming in some scenes of "Un Prophète".

Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos are amazing. I think that it is Emmanuel Devos best role ever (I wonder if she won best actress at the César for this movie, I'm not sure anymore) - if you saw her in "Comment je me suis disputé..." you will be somehow surprised.
I think that it was J.Audiard best achievement for a movie about a young woman, clumsy, insecure, but with a kind of dark side, a bit manipulative, but not like a femme fatale, even if - like the old dark femme fatale movies, she will gain progressively confidence and "féminité" - until the tenderness encounter between two "outsiders" ?
It's somehow funny (at the beginning - there is a kind of reference to F.Truffaut (the ANPE recruitment), and as tense as "Beat"...
You can't be wrong with the rest of the cast.

I don't have in mind some other movies with ear-impaired with "reading lips" (besides 2001 8-[ - all movies that I have in mind where used to be like horror / high-tense movies like "Témoin Muet".

I'm half way through a British crime series called Code of Silence, whose plot has a lot of similarities to Read My Lips: deaf woman, working menial jobs and frustrated with others underestimating her, gets involved with a criminal while trying to figure out where a heist is taking place, but in this case for the police. Starring hearing impaired actress Rose Ayling-Ellis, it's more realistic about how lip reading works and how much interpretive skill is involved.

[stephstilley]

I watched Fingers after seeing TBTMHS for the first time and this is a rare instance where I felt the remake was a better film than the original... Fingers is interesting but the introduction of Dreems takes the story in a really unsettling direction, it was a wise decision to not include this subplot in Beat... As it is, Fingers is a new addition to my "most disturbing" top 10... it's a good thing I really enjoy movies that center around crime/criminal activities because this seems to be Criterion's favorite genre lately