The beat that my heart skipped

Aure Atika with Romain Duris who plays a man accustomed to bullying to get what he wants from everyone around him.

Herald rating: * * * *

A remake of a 1978 American film, Fingers, which starred Harvey Keitel as a pianist who worked for the mob, this smart and classy French offering turns the idea on its head: it's a film about a gangster who metamorphoses - or rather changes back - into a pianist.

When we first meet Thomas (Duris), he is a wideboy in a sharp suit and permanently plugged into an iPod full of techno music, who works as a real-estate enforcer. He specialises in making offers they can't refuse to squatters in his clients' buildings, liberating sacks of rats into dingy apartment blocks or simply trashing the places and menacing or assaulting their indigent immigrant occupants. Meanwhile, his reluctant cover-up of his boss' marital infidelities draws him into an affair with that man's betrayed wife; and he has to keep helping out his father (Arestrup), a has-been hood who inspires in him a blend of embarrassment and fierce loyalty.

Then a chance encounter disinters long-buried musical aspirations: Thomas, whose late mother was a concert pianist, once studied the piano and, before long, the young hoodlum is at the keyboard, hour after hour, under the tutelage of a new Chinese immigrant Miao-Lin (Pham) who speaks barely a word of French, so he can audition for a place in the conservatory.

The film posits a connection between the criminal and the artistic temperament that is at once dissonant and spiritually equivalent. Thomas' rages at his tutor (they culminate in a stunning sequence in which she dresses him down in a long speech neither he nor non-Chinese audiences will understand) are like those of a man accustomed to bullying what he wants out of everyone around him. At last, he must reach inside himself for what he wants and watching what happens is electrifying.

Duris (The Spanish Apartment and its upcoming sequel Russian Dolls), combines the smouldering old-fashioned charisma of Delon and Belmondo with the vulnerability of James Dean. He's remarkable, because Thomas is a faintly repellent figure, but Duris allows the humanity to seep around the edges of his often monstrous behaviour. A stylish, adrenalised film that is as French as Gauloises and pastis. Recommended.

CAST: Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Linh-Dan Pham, Aure Atika
DIRECTOR: Jacques Audiard
RUNNING TIME: 107 mins
RATING: M, violence, sexual references and offensive language
SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday