‘Beating Hearts’ Review: Gilles Lellouche’s Epic Outlaw Love Story Is A Crowd-Pleasing French Hit – Cannes Film Festival
deadline.comSeemingly from out of nowhere, actor turned director Gilles Lellouche throws a Molotov Flanby into the Competition with only his second feature, a terrific and unexpectedly potent piece of genre filmmaking that could, to avoid spoilers, be described as a kind of mash-up of Badlands and La Haine, as if directed by Walter Hill.
Throw in a little Eurocrime, from the likes of Fernando Di Leo and late-period Jean-Pierre Melville, and you’re getting close to what Lellouche has achieved here, a romantic banlieue opera that delivers all the gritty, vicarious thrills of the now-standard post-Goodfellas gangster movie but also burrows into issues of class and gender in refreshingly unpredictable ways.
It arrives as a movie seemingly made by committee, since the film is based on an Irish novel — Jackie Love Johnser OK? By Neville Thompson — and features contributions by fellow filmmakers Ahmed Hamidi and Audrey Diwan.
It quickly transpires that this is a good thing, since Beating Hearts is a film that constantly interrogates itself, pulling back from cliché to create a movie that’s not so much a riff on West Side Story as The Shangri-las’ 1964 bubblegum hit “The Leader of the Pack” come to life. (Get the picture?).
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