In Contention

Tag: The Beat That My Heart Skipped

  • INTERVIEW: Jacques Audiard

    Jacques Audiard at the Cannes premiere of A ProphetAs pundits continue to posit art-versus-genre arguments around the 10 titles vying for Best Picture, the finest film to be nominated in any category at this year’s Academy Awards is to be found a little further down the list – and it’s one that would bridge the discussion rather nicely.

    Nominated last week for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and bedecked with numerous accolades besides, Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet,” is a brazen, brilliant marriage of pulp, prestige and politics.

    A bloody prison drama that phrases intricate social analysis in the language of gangster cinema at its most hardboiled, it’s Audiard’s beefiest excursion yet into the noir territory that he visited in his last two films, lean thrillers “Read My Lips” and “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.”

    Critics have been quick to make comparisons to assorted American genre masters since the film’s Cannes premiere nine months ago , with “GoodFellas” and even “The Godfather” routinely surfacing in discussions around the film. But while Audiard acknowledges his kinship to U.S. cinema – this is a man, after all, whose last feature was a remake of a 1978 James Toback thriller – he takes such talk with a healthy pinch of salt.

    “People keep saying, oh, it’s like Scorsese, or it’s like Coppola, and of course that’s very flattering,” the native Parisian says over the phone, via the translation (and occasional embellishment) of his co-writer Thomas Bidegain.

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  • Guy’s top 50 of the decade: #41-50

    Tang Wei in Lust, CautionHere we go. I’ll reserve a more complete intro for the final part on Wednesday, but a quick word on the compilation of the list that will unfold over the next five days.

    When, several months ago, I began the long, occasionally maddening but not altogether unpleasant process of sifting out the best films of the last ten years, I thought reducing a decade’s work of high-quality cinema – the first time I’ve really been of an age to attempt such an exercise – to a mere 10 films seemed an impossibility.

    So I rather naively decided that a Top 50 – the equivalent, if you will, of a decade’s worth of Best Picture nominees (though not equally allocated by year) – seemed a less punishing task. More room for the films I love, less fretting about inclusions, happy days.

    And then a funny thing happened.

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  • And the lists just keep on coming

    Russell Crowe in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the WorldBetween now and December 31, we’re probably going to read more “best ____ of the 2000s” lists than we know what to do with. But we like lists, don’t we? And this only happens once every 10 years. Let’s not get blasé already.

    So with the floodgates already open on “films of the decade” talk, there’s plenty more to fuel the discussion. Paste Magazine has a nicely balanced Top 50 that puts “City of God” in pole position, and wins extra cinephile points for putting Claire Denis alongside Peter Jackson in the top 10.

    Meanwhile, The Times supplements their own collective with a (impossibly formatted) selection of Top Tens from assorted British industry figures, including Julian Fellowes and Richard Eyre. “An Education” scribe Nick Hornby wins top marks from me for a list that includes “Lantana,” “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” and “I’m Not There.”

    But for my money, no list I’ve seen so far is as rich and well thought-out as Telegraph critic Tim Robey’s personal Top 100 — a corrective of sorts to the “films that defined the decade” list he compiled with his Telegraph colleagues, which took some flak on the web, these pages included.

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  • LONDON: Another prophet

    Tahar Rahim in A ProphetBack in early September, which feels longer ago than it probably should, regular commenter Chris offered the following (non-Oscar-related) prediction:

    You need to see “A Prophet”, I saw it two days ago, and it’s such an amazing film. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I’m predicting it to be on Guy Lodge’s top 10 of the year, just so you know what kind of film it is.

    Either I am terribly predictable, or Chris is a very wise man — we’ll flatter us both and say the latter — but after staggering out of this morning’s London Film Festival press screening, I see no way this doesn’t come to pass.

    There will likely be plenty of opportunities to discuss this stunner in the months to come (Kris already offered a brief take from Telluride), but suffice to say that the great Jacques Audiard has exceeded his previous career high-water mark, “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” with this expansive, brutal, darkly funny and richly compassionate character study.

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  • ‘A Prophet’ impresses at Cannes

    Tahar Rahim in A ProphetAng Lee may have struck out, but happily, another of my favorite auteurs in the Cannes lineup has had better luck today. I mentioned earlier this week that Jacques Audiard’s prison drama “A Prophet” was one of the Competition titles I was most personally interested in, and the reviews from today’s press screening justify my faith.

    Like Audiard’s superb “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” the film appears to be another genre-infused exercise, though with a broader, grittier touch than that delicate character study — and Screen Daily’s Jonathan Romney thinks that shift could pay strong commercial dividends:

    (Audiard’s) violent, gripping prison drama A Prophet shows him extending his range with unimpeachable command. The story of a gauche young inmate who rises through the criminal ranks to become a formidable player, A Prophet works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment.

    The film should have the same international appeal as last year’s Cannes crime hit Gomorrah. Its unapologetically testosterone-laden tenor will give the film a resonance way beyond the international art-house constituency that embraced Audiard’s last film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped.

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