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.