Young love’s two beating hearts are this film’s high point, but keep watching
The strength of new film Beating Hearts is its teen love story, but the rest is good enough to keep you watching to the end.
When teenagers Jacqueline (Mallory Wanecque) and Clotaire (Malik Frikah) first meet, she, still at school, stands up to this leader of a “gang of deadbeats”. “I’ll call you Jackie,’’ he tells her. “I’ll call you never,’’ she replies.
It’s an excellent scene in Beating Hearts, a romantic drama directed and co-written by French actor and filmmaker Gilles Lellouche.
Indeed, the first half of the film, set in the 1980s and focused on the teens, is when this gangster romance is at its best. As adults in the 1990s, Jackie (Adele Exarchopoulos from the 2013 hit Blue is the Warmest Colour) and Clotaire (rising star and recent musketeer Francois Civil) are less interesting and have less chemistry.
The teenage romance between the girl expelled from a private school and the working class dropout bad boy has bits of West Side Story (Frikah is a professional breakdancer and there are dance scenes) and the 1980s coming-of-age movies of SE Hinton novels such as The Outsiders.
Jackie and Clotaire fall for each other. She skips school and he earns his keep through petty crime. It’s all sweetly overblown. Close-up of boy looking moodily at girl. Cut to girl looking dreamily at boy. A field of flowers. A solar eclipse. Cinematographer Laurent Tangy goes for it in a pleasantly cheesy way and the soundtrack chips in with 80s tunes such as Bill Idol’s Eyes Without a Face.
Clotaire falls in with a criminal gang. Benoit Poelvoorde has fun as the crooning crime boss. They hold up a payroll van at the port where Clotaire’s father works. It’s a terrific, tense scene that leads to the second half of the film in which beautiful Jackie is married and hard man Clotaire still wants her.
The question, of course, is are they in love?
When Jackie’s widowed father (a splendid Alain Chabat, who won a Cesar Award for the role) tells her she has a good life she replies with the line that underpins all that has happened and all that will happen: “Good isn’t enough.”
Civil looks a lot tougher than his recent role as D’Artagnan in the back-to-back The Three Musketeers movies. He reminds me of Russell Crowe in Geoffrey Wright’s 1992 drama Romper Stomper. The fight scenes, in both time frames, are impressive. Civil and Exarchopoulos are good but their characters are not as engaging as they are in their teens.
When this film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival it received negative reviews.
After scanning the thumbs downs I went into the cinema worried about the 160-minute run-time.
Needlessly as it turned out. I sat to the end because I needed to know what happened, which is a basic but fundamental part of storytelling.
If you go to this film be prepared for it to be a bit melodramatic, a bit over the top, a bit showy, a bit purple in its prose, a bit like a Billy Idol song.
Once I realised that and got into its over-self conscious groove I quite enjoyed it.
Beating Hearts (MA15+)
French language with English subtitles. 160 minutes. In cinemas
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