The Beat that My Heart Skipped

Today I watched another streamed film, and another French film. (I've definitely been on an unintentional French kick lately. Blame it on Fidel, Karmen Gei, Paris Je T'aime, and this one.) And they haven't let me down yet! Most of them films have had surprisingly cohesive and interesting plots!

And this one was no exception, although it's a French remake of an American film from 1978, Fingers, starring Harvey Keitel. Apparently that's a good movie too; I might end up trying to watch it if the film ever becomes easily rentable.

This film looked like a pretty violent one, so I decided to watch it in the afternoon (on the computer) so that I wouldn't become quite as absorbed in the film if it got tense and/or bloody. Luckily the film wasn't too violent, until the very end, but I felt like the violence was necessary to the plot.

A man (Romain Duris) works as for a kind of mob, beating up people who refuse to pay their rents and kicking people out. One night he runs into his piano teacher from when he was a boy, and the man asks him to audition for him. It turns out the man's dream was always to become a concert pianist, like his mother before she died, so he starts taking lessons every day from a Chinese woman who has just moved to France, and trying to get rid of the darker side of his life.

I really felt like the plot and characters were very believable, and the performances made me totally forget they were acting. (One of my problems, such as in the recent movie Atonement, where I kept imagining the actors--Keira Knightly especially--practicing their lines.)