Sibling Chemistry in ‘The Beat that My Heart Skipped’

I AM OF THE FIRM BELIEF that wintertime in Massachusetts calls for lots of movies—in the theater, with friends, in bed, online, wherever and with whomever. Recently, I revisited a movie that I was required to watch in a French class, De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, in English). On watching it for the second time, I fell even more in love with the story and with the principal actor, Romain Duris (mais, oui). The movie is about a small-time thug named Tomas (played by Duris) who dreams of following in his late mother’s footsteps as a famous concert pianist. While Duris plays an only child in the movie, pulled by the pressure of both his father and mother’s aspirations for him, his real-life sister, Caroline Duris, is present in the film.

When we see Romain hammering away on the keys of a muted piano in the movie, it’s Caroline who we hear performing the challenging pieces.

Romain labored for months before the film was shot, to master Bach’s Toccata in E minor with the aid of his sister, who is a real-life pianist and piano teacher in Paris. When we see Romain hammering away on the keys of a muted piano in the movie, it’s Caroline who we hear performing the challenging pieces. On doing some research, I recently learned that even a moment of Caroline’s frustration made it into the movie, as she broke from a recording session to exclaim that her heart was beating too fast. In the movie, we hear her voice as the voice of Tomas’s mother, on an old audio recording that he can’t stop listening to. Caroline also plays all the piano tracks on the film’s eclectic soundtrack–a mix of contemporary rock in French and English, alongside classical piano pieces. The two-disc soundtrack is phenomenal, as is the movie. And the subtle presence of brother-sister collaboration makes it that much more interesting.

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