Mitt hjärtas förlorade slag

Stockholm International Film Festival welcomes back director Jacques Audiard who in 1996 won the prize for best screenplay for his second movie A Self-Made Hero. This time around we get to meet Tom, a young man sandwiched between two very different realities; his father’s semi-criminal world and his dead mother’s high-brow cultural belongings. His difficult relationship with his father leads him further and further down the path of violence, but Tom is unwilling to stop until a chance encounter with a friend of his mother’s provides an alternative – the piano music he studied as a child. Thereby the link to his mother, herself a pianist, and her world gets stronger. Heavily inspired by James Toback’s film Fingers (1978) in which we saw Harvey Keitel as the pianist/thug, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a complex film which deals with such basics as love, loyalty, beauty, and death, and in which Romain Duris gets a good excuse to shag girls, pick fights, and smoke while looking handsome and suitably broody. LISA MARIE MANNFOLK