French romantic drama Beating Hearts is in no hurry to reunite lovers
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.
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.
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