By Jake Wilson
BEATING HEARTS
★★★
MA. 160 minutes. Selected cinemas from Thursday May 29
An early scene in Gilles Lellouche’s Beating Hearts tells us all we need to know about the idealised romance between teenage dreamers Clotaire (Malik Frikah) and Jackie (Mallory Wanecque).
Clotaire, who already sees himself as a tough guy, has just been in a schoolyard fight where he’s successfully fought off his attackers three to one, with a crowd of kids cheering him on. Looking up, he finds himself face-to-face with Jackie, who hands him her bandana to wipe the blood off his face, like a queen at a jousting tournament bestowing a favour.
Francois Civil and Adele Exarchopoulos in Beating Hearts.Credit: Palace
A moment on, both their faces are bathed in white light, the other characters have vanished, and we’re off into a fantasy dance sequence performed by the two of them mostly in silhouette, set to A Forest by The Cure (a little incongruously, if we pay attention to the lyrics about “running towards nothing”).
As this soundtrack choice suggests, all of this is happening in the mid-1980s – which suggests in turn that Lellouche, born in 1972, is tapping into nostalgia for his own youth, or the youth he wishes he had, especially in the film’s first and superior half.
The script is based on a novel by the Irish writer Neville Thompson, with the setting changed from the suburbs of Dublin to an industrial town in northern France. But the plot is the old standby “boy meets girl” followed by inevitable heartbreak.
However hard Clotaire and Jackie have fallen for each other, life takes them in different directions, as we discover when we resume the story after a 10-year time jump, with the pair now played by Francois Civil and Adele Exarchopoulos. Following a stint in prison, Clotaire becomes a full-on gangster, while she winds up married to her controlling former boss (Vincent Lacoste).
While Civil and Exarchopoulos are nominally the film’s leads, they make far less impact than Frikah and Wanecque as the younger, less jaded versions of the same characters, especially as Lellouche isn’t in a rush to reunite the lovers, or to convince us they really could pick up where they left off.
But if Beating Hearts isn’t fully successful as a love story in the usual sense, it does express its maker’s love of cinema (as well as pop music). Almost every shot is some kind of flourish, although certain devices lose power through repetition, such as tracking or zooming in on a character to underline their look of rapt contemplation.
This is not really a matter of overt homages, but evident inspiration has been taken from Martin Scorsese’s gangster movies and Jacques Demy’s musicals, both of which exemplify the kind of self-aware popular filmmaking where the gap between fantasy and reality is part of the subject matter.
While Lellouche may be aiming for something comparable, his bent is clearly for adolescent fantasy first and foremost. Even after more than 2½ hours, the story of this couple feels less than fully resolved - but where he’s concerned, the prospect of following them further into adulthood may not hold much interest.
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