In this blog post, we will examine how characters in Jacques Audiard’s films form and transform their desires within broken family relationships, exploring the emotional and aesthetic depth inherent in his work.
The Heartbeat That Starts Again
Two men sit facing each other on a sofa. The protagonist, Tom, listens as his close friend Sami pours out his regret-filled lament. The conversation, which began with dissatisfaction toward a patriarchal father, culminates in Sami expressing his longing and regret for his father, who has already passed away. The moment Sami says, “My first child was born the year after my father passed away,” the screen darkens. A single small light streaks across the screen, accelerating like a gradually rising heartbeat graph. Amidst this, the film’s title, “My Heart Skipped a Beat” (DE BATTRE MON CŒUR S’EST ARRETÉ) — hereafter ‘My Heart’ — appears outside a car window.
Directed by Jacques Audiard in 2005, this film garnered significant attention, winning the Best Director and Best Film awards at the 31st César Awards the following year. The film draws inspiration from James Toback’s “Fingers.” While the original possesses strong cult-like qualities, director Jacques Audiard, a screenwriter by background, boldly altered most of the original’s settings and the protagonist’s profession, earning praise for creating a work superior to its source material.
The film begins against the backdrop of the protagonist’s mother passing away ten years prior, depicting the inner conflict of a young man torn between love and resentment for his father and his own future. Tom loves his father but simultaneously wants to escape the authoritarian attitude and violence (the rough methods of a real estate broker) his father has displayed. In the film, Tom is portrayed as a figure enslaved to his father’s work, moving like a puppet. This dynamic of subjugation is a recurring theme in Jacques Audiard’s other work, “The Prophet.”
One day, Tom happens to meet his mother’s former pianist manager and feels a desire to revive his long-forgotten dream of becoming a pianist. So what does the ‘missed beat’ in the film signify for Tom? Is it his unfulfilled childhood aspiration to become a pianist? Most audience reactions and online reviews primarily describe ‘My Heart’ as “Tom’s coming-of-age story, struggling to reclaim his long-forgotten dream.” This interpretation isn’t incorrect, of course.
However, personally, I came to see this film as the story of a man who lived for a long time deprived under his father’s dark shadow, confronting the clear void created by his mother’s absence (= the aspiration to be a pianist), and becoming obsessed and desiring to fill that void. In other words, ‘Tom’s Skipped Heartbeat’ symbolizes not merely the recovery of a postponed dream, but the moment when the deprived emotion begins to beat again from the depths, taking the form of desire. At this point, the film deeply captures the movement of personal wounds and desire, concluding its story.
Father’s Shadow, Mother’s Absence
The first 10 minutes of the film ‘My Heart’ depict Tom releasing rats to evict tenants alongside his friends and colleagues, enjoying a dissolute life in clubs and on the streets with his associates, and engaging in clandestine deals with those involved in brokerage work. Tom’s actions—forcibly evicting tenants, demolishing their rooms with his associates, and destroying a family—reveal a close connection to the film’s subsequent narrative. Tom lives independently from his father, and his mother is no longer alive. In light of this, the places where Tom and his father converse are mostly limited to restaurants or cafes. Later in the film, a scene appears where father and son coexist within the space of a house, but even that moment reflects a strained relationship between them. Their communication, confined to places outside the home, reveals no familial image.
This disconnect is particularly stark in their café conversations. When the father announces he has a new woman and plans to marry, describing her to his son, and in Tom’s reaction, the typical father-son dynamic is entirely absent. Tom, as if rejecting his father, insults the new woman, calling her a whore and provoking his father.
The café sequence where father and son first meet (the film’s first glimpse of the father) and the later scene where Tom coincidentally encounters his mother’s former manager are structured as a contrast: the present-day relationship with his father versus the past memory evoking the void left by his mother’s absence. The film cross-cuts between these two time periods, gradually amplifying the void caused by the mother’s absence and the desire to become a pianist. Furthermore, through Tom’s act of alternating between listening to electronic and classical music, images of the present and past are simultaneously constructed. This forms the trauma Tom experiences, caught between the ‘present father’—violent, authoritarian, and forcing his son into criminal acts for money—and the ‘past mother’—a talented pianist who left without spending much time with him. Returning from meeting his manager one evening, Tom listens to a tape of his mother’s piano playing while gazing at the closed piano lid, lost in reflection. This scene presents the piano as a symbol of his mother within the film. This direction connects to a characteristic director Jacques Audiard has shown in both his earlier and recent works: the way he combines the physical body with narrative.
In ‘My Heart,’ the image of ‘hands’ is particularly emphasized. Given Tom’s aspiration to become a pianist, his hands inevitably carry significant meaning. Simultaneously, however, Tom’s hands also serve the function of being mobilized for his father’s errands and violent acts. In the restaurant scene where Tom and his father meet for the second time, Tom confesses his dream of becoming a pianist, but his father dismisses it as foolish talk. Soon after, the father assigns Tom a task, but Tom rebels against his father’s condescension. Ultimately, the father goes to resolve the problem himself but is driven away without even being able to fight back. Later, Tom enters the restaurant in his father’s place to resolve the issue but ends up cutting his hand. The camera focuses on Tom’s wounded hand, and later, in a shot of Tom getting into a car, the injury is again emphasized. Furthermore, in the early to mid-part of the film, a close-up shows Tom sitting at a club bar, moving his fingers as if mimicking piano playing. This visually expresses the process of recognizing a deficiency in Tom’s current life and desiring to fill that void (i.e., his obsession with the pianist audition).
To audition for the pianist role, Tom seeks out a teacher to test him, but becomes disappointed by the teacher’s suspicious attitude and overly demanding reactions, preparing to leave. At that moment, he is introduced to Mao Lin by an Asian man. Mao Lin is portrayed as a character who does not speak French in the film, and the relationship between Mao Lin and Tom is depicted as akin to that of a mother and son. When the performance doesn’t go as planned, Tom’s angry outburst resembles a child throwing a tantrum at his mother. Later, during a practice scene, when Tom snaps at Mao Lin, she shouts at him like a scolding child, leaving Tom flustered. He then sits quietly and plays the piano again.
Amidst preparing for a pianist audition and striving toward a new life, Tom faces crises: problems arise with his real estate broker friends, and an assault incident involving a figure named Minskopf connected to his father compounds the trouble. Though he tries to escape his father’s shadow, the situation only spirals further out of control. Seeking revenge for his father, Tom tracks down Minskopf, but instead chooses to have a relationship with Minskopf’s lover and returns to his father. His father watches this with displeasure.
Time passes. Tom, now wearing a crisp white shirt, heads to an audition but ultimately fails. Standing on the street, he takes out the headphones he’d been using to listen to electronic music and puts them back on. He heads to his father’s house, where he finds his father brutally murdered by Minskop, lying beside the bed. Two years later, Tom and Mao Lin are lovers. Acting as Mao Lin’s manager, Tom drops her off at the performance venue and spots Minskoff just as he’s about to park. The ensuing shot mirrors the composition of Tom’s back walking toward his father two years prior, and Tom unleashes indiscriminate violence on Minskoff. Gasping for breath, Tom sits in the theater audience, his bloodied hands trembling slowly as if pressing piano keys.
Finally opening his eyes, Tom looks at Mao Lin. Though he still seems like a creature writhing, not yet fully free from his father’s shadow, perhaps because she resembles his mother, the talented pianist, Tom’s gaze toward Mao Lin sparkles, and a faint smile seems to linger at the corners of his mouth. Thus, the film emotionally concludes that Tom is still living a life of uncertainty, through the flow of his wounds, deficiencies, and desires.
The Body in Jacques Audiard’s Films
From ‘Read My Mind’ to ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’, ‘A Prophet’, and ‘Rust and Bone’, Jacques Audiard’s films began to establish his unique personality and patterns in earnest starting with ‘Read My Mind’ in 2001. Critic Lee Dong-jin wrote in his review of ‘A Prophet’: “After debuting with ‘ See How They Fall,“ Jacques Audiard has primarily crafted his works within the framework of crime dramas, through ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ and ‘A Prophet.’” He emphasizes recurring themes in Audiard’s films: protagonists experiencing intense turmoil between two worlds, and the ‘process of learning’ required to transcend that turmoil. As critic Lee Dong-jin noted, “The Prophet is a gangster coming-of-age film. A boy on the threshold of twenty, who must tremblingly pass the rite of passage of murder, experiences countless crimes inside and outside prison, finally awakening to his own identity and becoming an adult.” This review demonstrates how crucial the theme of ‘learning’ is in Jacques Audiard’s films.
Another element to note is the ‘body’. In ‘Read My Mind’, the female protagonist’s ears are repeatedly shown in close-up. She wears a hearing aid due to poor hearing, but understands speech by reading others’ lip movements. Thus, the ‘ear’ transcends a mere physical disability; it symbolizes her survival strategy and ability, functioning as a central narrative device.
In ‘The Prophet’, hands and feet, eyes and mouth are used as metaphorical symbols. The prison warden assigns the protagonist sequential ‘missions’ during his growth process; the order and method of these missions are also determined through physical actions, closely intertwined with the story’s structure. The body is not merely a narrative device but becomes the very process through which the protagonist learns about and traverses the world.
In his recent work ‘Rust and Bone,’ the body also occupies a central narrative role. The female protagonist loses her leg in an accident, and the male protagonist becomes her limbs, assisting her in daily life. Simultaneously, the male protagonist earns money as a fighter using his own body, performing survival through his body itself. Thus, the bodies of these two characters function as a relationship that fills each other’s deficiencies and as a device driving emotional and narrative change.
In Jacques Audiard’s films, the body thus forms a close relationship with the narrative, operating as a key structural element that reveals the process by which characters experience the world, grow, and change. The body is both the subject and the device of the narrative, serving as a crucial aesthetic axis that runs through the world of Audiard’s films.
The Current State of Director Jacques Audiard
Director Jacques Audiard, already regarded as a master in his home country, may still feel somewhat unfamiliar to the general Korean audience. He earned the reputation as the second godfather with his film ‘A Prophet,’ and his name gradually became known in Korea following the 2012 release of ‘Rust and Bone.’ As mentioned earlier, Jacques Audiard’s films have, at some point, clearly established themselves as possessing a distinct character uniquely his own. In fact, his works have garnered attention in France as Cannes Film Festival entries, generating buzz locally early on, though they often opened relatively late in South Korea.
I sincerely hope his current cinematic direction doesn’t significantly change and that he continues to steadily produce excellent films. Reviewing all of Jacques Audiard’s works, one gets the impression that his meticulous screenplays and narrative are intricately woven together through his visual composition, with artistic and emotional elements balanced harmoniously. I find myself aspiring to become a director who, like Jacques Audiard, can convey profound seriousness and artistic sensibility with such delicate precision, and to create works of that caliber. Even as I finish writing this, my anticipation for his next film’s release remains as strong as ever.
