 |
| La question humaine, France 2007 |
If you’re a fan of Hitchcock, of Kubrick, of the kind of thriller that has the implacable mystery of great sculpture or great architecture, of movies that create their own visual, aural and symbolic universe and suck you bodily into them – well, you’ve simply got to see this. Mathieu Amalric, the tremendous actor who plays the paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, stars here as a man battling a very different kind of paralysis. Amalric plays Simon Kessler, a corporate psychologist who works in the Parisian subsidiary of SC Farb, a major German multinational that apparently manufactures chemicals. From its very first frames – images of dark-suited corporate executives as they move into, through and back out of the men’s room – Heartbeat Detector works on so many levels at once that its power is difficult to capture. To begin with, Klotz captures the antiseptic, geometric cool of the 21st century European business world with almost surreal clarity. It’s a zone of conflict from which all blood and emotion have been purged. Simon, who combines the roles of levelheaded rationalist and swinging bachelor, has become one of its lesser ninjas… Farb’s No 2 executive, the cadaverous Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), has asked Simon to look into the mental health of CEO Matthias Jüst (played by the great Anglo-French actor Michael Lonsdale), who’s been behaving erratically. But the more Simon learns about Rose and Jüst, the latter a longtime amateur musician who now experiences Schubert’s famous quartet "Death and the Maiden" as physical torture, the murkier their history seems – and the more treacherous Simon’s own pseudo-scientific, pseudo-rational vocabulary becomes… – Andrew O'Hehir, salon.com Radical director Nicolas Klotz and his filmmaking partner Elisabeth Perceval… have managed to fashion a dystopian thriller as chilling, atmospheric and relevant as anything French cinema has produced since Godard’s Alphaville… Perceval and Klotz’s film presents a fascinating collision of two fertile recent sub-genres in French cinema – the cinema of ‘anxiety’ and those films, such as Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources, which closely examine the realities of the modern workplace. However, Heartbeat Detector is more experimental. It moves away from realism towards more expressionist cinematic stylings – notably in its uses of sound, music and non-language based communication – that, at their best, bounce delicious contemporary echoes of Clouzot’s dark misanthropy and Franju’s poetic surrealism. The price may be a certain obscurity – and an unwelcome magisterial pomposity – but there’s few movies in town as original, challenging or, possibly, upsetting. – Wally Hammond, Time Out |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
