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‘Beating Hearts’ Review: Gilles Lellouche’s Swollen, Lovestruck Gangster Melodrama Isn’t Afraid to Be Uncool
A supersized story of amour fou between a good girl and a bad boy, Gilles Lellouche's 'Beating Hearts' is best when it gives in to its wildest urges.
Gilles Lellouche does all of these, in significant quantities, in his supersized gangster melodrama “ Beating Hearts,” which takes the slender plot of innumerable B-movies of the past — as time and crime collaborate to derail the pure-hearted romance between two pretty young things — and blows it up to a dizzily grand scale, complete with widescreen camera gymnastics, daydreamy reality breaks and sporadic swirls of Old Hollywood musical choreography. Lellouche spends rather too long on the pair’s first flush of puppy-love, giving us one glowingly shot montage after another of starry-eyed scene fragments — dewy lovemaking on the beach, a perfect kiss in a sprawling, canary-colored canola field — that rather overstress a point already made by a single more arresting fantasy setpiece. Handed the pithiest, most emotionally exposed dialogue in the script by Lellouche, Ahmed Hamidi and “Happening” director Audrey Diwan, she brings the viewer fully into Jackie’s pit of arrested adolescent despair as she weeps to a mixtape recording of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” It’s another scene where you wish that “Beating Hearts” — already so disarming in its heart-on-sleeve surrender to feeling, and so brazenly unconcerned with being composed or cool — would take that complete leap into the void, and let the lady sing.
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