Nobody asked but Gilles Lellouche has done it anyway: he has made the best use of a hiphop song on the big screen in recent memory. For his 2024 Cannes competition entry, Beating Hearts, the galvanising drum- and gun- play strains of the Nas 2002 hit, ‘Made You Look’, play over a montage of gritty violence perpetuated by a troupe of French gangsters.
It’s a criminally good sequence—and Lellouche knows what grim beauty he has wrought. He allows the song to play on longer than you might expect, interjecting its intoxicating groove with an explosive blast of his own. The confidence at play is astounding and “remixing” a popular rap song is a mark of artistic indulgence that Lellouche pulls off too well. Maybe he is masturbating at length—his film is over 160 minutes—but he is also pleasuring to the viewer. Or maybe that’s a coincidence. Whatever the case, his film is a blast.
An epic tale of love, revenge, youth, rage, and class, Beating Hearts (original French title L’Amour Ouf) is an extraordinarily lively work of cinema. Based on a Neville Thompson novel, the tale spans years, following Clotaire and Jacqueline, a combative ne’er-do-well boy and the high school girl he falls in love with after she responds to his jibes with insults of her own. It’s the typical meet cute of kids: the one where cruelty supposedly masks affection.
On that maiden meeting, Clotaire learns Jackie, as he calls her, likes The Cure and steals a vinyl for her, but she brusquely says she already has it. It’s dismissive, but she has already shown that she likes this suitor and music will remain important to this pair of lovers, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ playing a recurring role in their romance over decades. This use of pop music is one reason Beating Hearts will appeal to a vast number of viewers. Another reason is the genre elements deployed cleverly and energetically—to say nothing of the fact that Jackie grows up to become Adele Exarchopoulos, a draw for European viewers wherever they may be found.
Speaking of the French woman, her sexuality was front and centre in 2013’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour. A decade on, that appeal abides, but she wears it subtly and wields it lightly. In one scene here, in the second half, the camera films her from behind as she walks with another character. She is wearing shorts and doing nothing of note but even that nothing is charged enough for the few seconds the camera lingers. But just before she appears onscreen as the older version of Jackie, her lover Clotaire goes to jail, while she loses her way. The story forgets him briefly and Jackie becomes the solo lead.
When he reappears, he does so as a cooly menacing François Civil. And it is never in doubt that the lovers will find their way to meet again. There is no suspension of disbelief required: it’s easy to believe that the old flame still burns for Clotaire because, well, the older Jackie is played by Exarchopoulos.
In life and on screen, this is believable. The problem is that a reunion is inconvenient. But you get it. For those who have been there, a certain kind of love can prove inescapable.
This love story might be enough. But not for Lellouche. He seems intent on becoming an auteur. His ideas of lighting up a scene are interesting and seem to borrow a little from Gaspar Noé. While noirish and gritty, some of his night scenes are drenched in neon-red, a good-looking gimmick that often foreshadows violence in a film brimming with it. For an actor-turned-director who has only made one solo feature before this one, his command of cinema as a visual art form is beyond competent. Here and there, you find pleasing flourishes. There are dance sequences that are the visual expression of the lovers’ mutual infatuation; there is a piece of chewing gum which throbs tellingly like a heart. There are color codes seeming to telegraph an ambiguity that is tied to the film’s interpretation. The camera pans are super-charged. We get the striking animation of an eclipse—twice!
Lellouche’s writing is just as good, even if the story does have a few loose ends. The screenplay, which he has co-written with Ahmed Hamidi and Audrey Diwan, is dotted with so many quotables—as though his aim from the start was to produce a script closely resembling an old school rap song, the type chockablock with punchlines. Deploying Nas, now one of the hiphop’s masters of a semi-ancient epoch, is no coincidence.
And yet, for all the violent masculinity at play, Lellouche is a sentimental man. At one point, his story seems destined to take a Tarantino path of cartoonish violence and/or the Park Chan-wook bus of the futile vengeance. Instead, he constructs a third route. Even if his film’s first and last scenes are framed to allow a viewer’s interpretation, it is a trick anyone paying attention can see through. We know the interpretation the director and his co-writers prefer because only a certain kind of man would synchronise lovemaking with a lunar eclipse. These people are in love with love.
Using Clotaire and Jackie, they want to make a case for why viewers should be just as enthralled with love and romance—despite all of life’s violence and injustice. They succeed and do so exceedingly well.
Director: Gilles Lellouche
Screenplay: Gilles Lellouche, Audrey Diwan, Ahmed Hamidi
Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, François Civil, Mallory Wanecque, Malik Frikah, Alain Chabat, Benoît Poelvoorde
Producers: Alain Attal, Hugo Sélignac
Cinematography: Laurent Tangy
Editing: Simon Jacquet
Production companies: Tresor Films, Chi-Fou-Mi Productions
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
166 minutes
