48/100
Wish I hadn’t somehow let more than two decades slip by between Beat That My Heart Skipped and finally watching the original, so that I could feel truly confident in asserting that Audiard improved upon Toback in just about every conceivable way. For example, I’m pretty sure—but could not swear in court—that the 2005 remake doesn’t kick off with a sitcom-level gag that sees our antihero, driving recklessly, smugly announce “This car’s an extension of my—” CRASH!! Schematic scenario’s the same in both, but Keitel’s Jimmy, in keeping with Toback’s fundamentally stunted worldview (I’m not a fan, though haven’t seen Pick-Up Artist or Bugsy since they were in theaters), develops an immature fixation on Tisa Farrow’s emotionally inaccessible sex worker, culminating in a truly bizarre borderline-rape scene that involves Jimmy insisting that Carol remove her diaphragm. That ugliness never really gets explored (as, say, Travis’ did in Taxi Driver), and is to my mind far less interesting than Skipped’s cross-cultural teacher-student relationship, which Audiard invented from scratch (again, if I can trust my 21-year-old memory of a film I saw only once). Keitel, oddly enough (given that he’d just played Sport), seems much more comfortable as an aspiring artist than as a fearsome enforcer, and leans intriguingly hard on the proto-Baby Driver idea of someone who can’t function without a constant musical soundtrack, which in Jimmy’s case does not entail earbuds—he just spends the whole movie blasting a mini-boombox in public spaces, like an Italian Radio Raheem. But that angle winds up being overshadowed by all manner of sexual weirdness, from Tanya Roberts’ character inexplicably letting Jimmy fuck her in the ladies’ room 90 seconds after he starts obnoxiously hitting on her to Jim Brown’s “Dreems” (okay) even more inexplicably inviting Jimmy to have a foursome 90 seconds after they meet. None of that shit’s in the Audiard, right? Can’t imagine my having rated that film 66/100 if it is.