Awards:
Best Film Music, Berlin Film Festival (2005)
Running time: 107’
Production: France, 2005
Rating: Not rated (brief scenes of violence)
Gauge: 35mm, DVD (color)
Distributor:
New Yorker Films
“A
blistering film you feel in the pit of your stomach, a
jumpy, edgy piece of work that thrust us into a personal
maelstrom so tortured and intense, the emotions could
be spread with a knife.”
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times.
In this stylish
reinterpretation of James Toback’s 1978 cult neo-noir
film Fingers, Jacques Audiard has combined equal parts Bach
and rock, in a groundbreaking Gallic transformation of a thoroughly
American genre: gangster-seeking-redemption film. Twenty-eight-year-old
Thomas appears destined to follow in the footsteps of his
slumlord father. Tom is a sleazy real estate manager who expels
squatters from low-rent buildings. An unexpected encounter
with the agent of his late mother who was a classical musician
reignites a long-buried desire for life as a concert pianist.
When the agent proposes an audition, Tom finds a special teacher
and propels himself back into his almost forgotten world of
classical music, even as he continues to strong-arm deadbeats
and other thugs under pressure from his father. As the conflict
between his parents’ widely disparate spheres intensifies,
Tom feels his longing to be a musician undermining his place
in the shadows of the Paris underworld. Will he find liberation?
This City of Lights thriller has a richly orchestrated mélange
of menace, yearning, and grace.
