Beating Hearts review - kiss kiss, slam slam

Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance on the screen through that kind of age gap readily enough.

But this French kissing-and-clobbering epic opts to recast its romantic leads midway through as they jump from teens to twenties, and it’s one reason why the Hauts-de-France Romeo and Juliet – directed by Gilles Lellouche – wrings few tears or heart-skips over its two-and-three-quarter-hour runtime.

Young Jackie (Mallory Wanecque) gloms onto a school dropout called Clotaire (Malik Frikah), who tosses insults at her mates as she heads for class each morning. Clotaire majors in petty crime, so we’re pretty soon into a cocktail loved by French movie mixologists down the decades – love and larceny. We’re in the 1980s, which means The Cure on the soundtrack and Chuck Taylors on the young feet in this northern industrial deadfall. 

Jackie is thoroughly distracted from her promising studies, it would seem, by the daring of Clotaire – his molesting of parking meters and nicking of records. Wanecque is a bright and expressive presence, while the sullen and callow Frikah doesn’t quite have the needed bad-boy vibe. Still, the two hook up against mild parental objections, just as Clotaire falls in with some serious criminal meanies led by the haggardly impressive Benoît Poelvoorde. 

After Clotaire is stitched up by his mates and sentenced to a ten-year stretch for a murder he was accomplice to, but didn’t actually commit, the film proper might be assumed to be commencing, as the now-adult lovers circle round each other on Clotaire’s release from jail. But instead of a half-hour “first act” for this set-up, we’re now at 75 minutes with two new lead actors – Adèle Exarchopoulos and François Civil. And they’re not given any face-time together for a further 80 minutes or so: there’s just a lot of pining for one another at a distance, while Clotaire finds room at the top as a crime lord of the high rises.

In one of the best sequences, Jackie is picked up in a downpour by a corporate type (Vincent Lacoste) and settles into a boring bourgie marriage with him. But when it comes to the true romance, we’ve spent such a long time on the Romeo and Juliet part that the Past Lives part doesn't ignite. The latter movie (Celine Song, 2023) was a sparkling examination of two young partners re-uniting across time – in that case, children and adults separated by 20 years. The recasting of that duo was both necessary and fascinating because they didn’t really know what they thought of each other.

Here, we get hard-to-act mutual yearning until near the close, at which point banlieue realism is swapped for some contrived (but fairly effective) staging of the kind you might find in a West End musical. Gang ruckuses plus cogitations on class and its unjust destinies – another French movie obligation – fill out the waiting time.

It’s hard to believe that Jackie would remain obsessed around the clock with a long-ago first crush as she approaches 30, but you can understand Clotaire wanting to jump back over his stolen years, and Civil now gives him the hurt, charismatic menace we need, with sharkish looks that call to mind French soccer icon Zinedine Zidane. Amid the beating hearts, there are also quite a lot of beatings-up, though not quite the “ultra-violence” promised by director Lellouche during the film’s production.

The movie, taken from a novel by Neville Thompson, might have been trying for the kind of heightened realism and poetry in Jacques Audiard’s shaggy and highly cinematic sagas, but Beating Hearts has more of the blood sugar levels of TV drama. The French title of the film was L’Amour Ouf, and sadly you might give a small ouf of relief at the end of its 165 minutes.

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