In yet another take on the ‘smart girl meets troubled boy from the wrong side of the tracks’ trope comes Beating Hearts (L’Amour ouf,) from director Gilles Lellouche. Adapted by Lellouche, Audrey Diwan and Ahmed Hamidi from Neville Thompson’s Dublin-set novel Jackie Loves Johnser OK?, the action is transposed to an industrial town in the north of France.
It’s the 1980s, replete with Sony Walkmans, mixtapes and a thumping score from composer Jon Brion. Lellouche clearly gets the importance of music to the elevated emotions of teenage love. And indeed, the film exists in its own heightened reality, straining for a grand operatic statement about the sustaining and redemptive power of love. It is overblown and, at 160 minutes, overlong. Subtle it ain’t, but it certainly doesn’t drag. The film has a dizzying propulsive energy.
Beating Hearts opens with what we presume to be the killing of one of the main characters in a shootout with a rival gang. How we get to this point occupies most of the remaining screen time, told in extended flashback. Jackie (Mallory Wanecque) meets Clotaire (Malik Frikah) outside her new school, and there’s an immediate attraction. Jackie is being raised by her father (the always good Alain Chabat) following her mother’s death in a car accident years earlier.
Clotaire comes from a large working-class family where love is not infrequently delivered with a beating from his father. Love blossoms slowly but intensely. Following a petty theft, Clotaire attracts the attention of a local crime boss, and part-time crooner (uh-huh) La Brosse (Benoît Poelvoorde). From there, the classic push-pull between love and destruction begins.
These early scenes exude a lightness, despite a few unsubtle clichéd shots. There is a lovely West Side Story-like dance number set to The Cure’s A Forest that appears from nowhere. But it works because it embodies the dream-like state that first love engenders. The film at this point is quite beguiling. Wanecque and Frikah have real chemistry, something that Adèle Exarchopoulos and François Civil as their characters’ later incarnations struggle to match.
It’s clear from these early scenes that one of the film’s strengths is Laurent Tangy’s cinematography. It looks terrific. Action sequences are sharply edited. It’s also clear that in terms of style, Lellouche is throwing the kitchen sink at it so that the film never really settles into a consistent visual or narrative whole.
Inevitably, in this zero-consequence world of young love, reality intrudes. Clotaire is seduced into La Brosse’s gang, but when a heist gone wrong results in the death of a security guard, Clotaire is wrongly blamed. While the drug boss’s son goes free, Clotaire is banged up. Leaving gaol after ten years, Clotaire carries a grievance over his abandonment even as he looks to rebuild his life.
The second half of the film takes on a much darker tone, with both Exarchopoulos and Civil giving intense, worn-down-by-life performances. Fizziness gives way to thuggery and a grungy bleakness. Clotaire resolves to avenge his treatment, while Jackie is trapped in a loveless, middle-class relationship with Jeffrey (an underused Vincent Lacoste.) Emphasising the tonal shift, the heartbreak of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U is replaced by Nas’ Made You Look pounding through a brutal bashing sequence. No sunflowers and sunshine here.
At some point, Lellouche seems to realise he’s spent too much time on the nostalgia of young love and not enough explaining how Clotaire and Jackie realistically reconnect. Their sliding door moment beggars some credulity. It is as much a fantasy as their nascent teenage love. As welcome as its optimistic tone is, the ending feels rushed and seemingly rewritten, and without moral (or legal) consequences. Then again, realism isn’t necessarily what the film is aiming for.
Beating Hearts doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but still, it has something. It is visually stunning, well-edited, with high-voltage action sequences directed with flair, and excellent performances. Ultimately, you’re left with ‘love conquers all’, though only after a little violence has been administered to those who have wronged you.
The Australian premiere season of Beating Hearts is showing now at Palace Cinemas around the country.
Tickets are on sale now!
Website: https://www.palacefilms.com.au/beating-hearts
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/palacecinemas/
See the trailer below:
