Un Coeur Qui Bat

There is a scene in Your Beating Heart which sums up why so many cinema fans in this country stay away from foreign, and particularly French, films. We see a couple in a grotty back-street Parisian café giving each other prolonged meaningful stares. This lasts for a full minute until the man mutters that "People are like the cafes they visit." "Really," replies the woman, "then my café has an ‘Under New Management’ sign in its window." The man nods in agreement and then silence is once again resumed.

The middle-aged couple were strangers until the morning before. They caught each other’s eye on the Metro and the man (Thierry Fortineau) followed his target (Dominique Faysee) into a coffee bar. His first words to her are "Do you know a hotel around here? …are you coming?" and by the next scene they’d had sex and exchanged telephone numbers. This run-of-the-mill situation is complicated by the fact that she is unhappily married to an antiques dealer, whom she cannot leave as they have a teenage son.

So now the lovers have arranged a rendezvous to discuss the future, the audience suddenly realises the kind of hour or so they are in for. There will be no interesting development of the tale, instead the lead characters will poetically reflect upon their situation in a pseudo-intellectual way. They won’t explain their feelings to each other for that would be too obvious, instead he will shout at a portrait-painter for not being able to capture the emotion in her eyes. She gazes at the sea for hours (for she lives on a boat) and it seems as if the idea is that the audience will feel pleased with itself for understanding all this deep conversation. We don’t though because it’s all so obvious, and one ends up wishing Fortineau had kept his eyes to the advertisements on the Underground like everybody else. Chris