“Beating Hearts” – an exhausting love thriller

Detective thriller, romantic tragedy, musical comedy: just a few days after Emilia Perez, French cinema is determined to eat everything up, to transform into sumptuous projects, to show a new operatic face. Only this time, Gilles Lellouche is in the driver’s seat. A paragon of potty virility (Sink or Swim) and burnt-out virility (Cédric Jimenez’s The Stronghold), the actor-director turns to wild romanticism for an unlikely coming-up into the inner circle. The love that makes thos hearts beat, then, is that of Clotaire (Malik Frikah/François Civil) and Jackie (Mallory Wanecque/Adèle Exarchopoulos) through the ages, he a tortured bad boy, she a much more reasonable character, though attracted by anything incandescent. Bad company leads to tragedy, then to a long prison ellipsis; upon release, the former lovers can’t escape their reunion – we’ll note, here, the kinship with the other French blockbuster at the end of the festival, The Count of Monte Cristo.

The film’s cast gives it a new status, turns it into a kind of symphony made out of the  current, 2024 French star system, which seems to be calling us, only to say: hey, look, we’re giving it our all, we’re playing, we’re crying, we’re shouting, we’re fighting, we’re running, we’re your stars. The film’s expenditure of energy is delirious, enslaved by an unquenchable quest for intensity resulting in copious use of eighties hits (A Forest, Nothing Compares 2 U, the Prince version – the loud jukebox was already the crutch of Sink or Swim), a direction of actors in a permanent fit of nerves, and a highly stylized mise-en-scene borrowing from musicals – Lellouche had claimed West Side Story, and if we’d laughed at the time, we understand it much better now.

Gigantic and hollering, Beating Hearts gives itself over entirely to a principle of one-upmanship that makes both its debacle and, to some extent, its success. The film scarcely allows itself a plain shot – even for a simple shot/counter-shot, cuts are replaced by brutal pans – perhaps because it’s aware that every time the image runs out of steam, the writing suddenly appears in its naked truth, that is, in its mixture of adolescent sugar-sweetness and clumsy punchlines, half corny, half badass. And yet, there’s something moving about the approach: silly lyricism: check, a caricature of hyper-prickly romanticism: check, but Lellouche puts such ardor and appetite into the exercise that one is tempted to forgive his gullibility, and to let oneself get carried away, at times, in the wake of his ginormous truck.