Remake of a 1978 James Toback film, "Fingers," in which Harvey Keitel played a crook who aspires to be a concert pianist. In "Beat," Tom Seyr (Romain Duris) is also a thug. He deals in low-end apartment house real estate, which frequently requires him to chase out tenants who would otherwise stay indefinitely under tough Parisian eviction rules.<br /><br />He and his buddies release rats into buildings, bash windows and toilets with baseball bats, and otherwise terrorize renters into beating hasty retreats to assure the success of impending building sales. And Tom tries to keep in touch with his dissolute widower father Robert (Niels Arestrup), who is also a nefarious wheeler-dealer.<br /><br />Tom's more cultured late mother, we can surmise, kept these two guys from descending into the gutter, while she was alive (we never meet her – there are no flashbacks in this film). She had been a successful concert pianist before her death a few years earlier, and Tom himself learned piano under her influence.<br /><br />Now, his chance meeting with her former manager results in an invitation to audition. But he's 28 and, though he still noodles around on his piano at home, he hasn't practiced seriously for 10 years. Still, he feels a pull to follow in his mother's footsteps and make something better of his life. So he finds a teacher - a recent immigrant from Beijing, Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham) - who schools him uncompromisingly to prepare for the audition.<br /><br />The resolution of this story is at once both inevitable and surprising, but the film turns on Duris's energetic, cat-like, springy presence in virtually every scene. He's forever on the move, and with his short fuse and inscrutably smug little smile, one never quite knows what he will do next. Just that it will be quick and decisive.<br /><br />For anyone even peripherally familiar with musical performance, it requires an unacceptable level of suspension of disbelief to think that this musical slacker could within just weeks polish his chops to a soloist's level of proficiency. The thought of it is pure nonsense.<br /><br />Duris is interesting enough to watch, but I was disappointed in this film, and not because of the absurdity of the conceit about musical performance. My hopes going in were high because of Jacques Audiard's earlier highly suspenseful films, "Read My Lips" (2001) and "A Self Made Hero" (1996). I thought that the male leads in those two films, Vincent Cassel and Mattieu Kassovitz, respectively, were both more intriguing than Duris is here.<br /><br />For that matter, if you want my nominee for the most tightly wound, electrifying male performer of the year, it isn't Romain Duris, it's the Turkish-German actor, Birol Ünel, who plays Cahit in the astonishing film, "Head-On." (In French, English, Mandarin & Russian). My rating: 7/10 (B). (Seen on 09/05/05). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.