Beating Hearts (2024)

Gilles Lellouche's Beating Hearts arrives with the bearing of a major statement: three hours of runtime, a Cannes competition slot, thirteen César nominations, and a title that promises cardiac upheaval. The film offers instead a star-crossed romance spanning the 1970s through the 1990s, in which a working-class boy and an upper-middle-class girl fall desperately in love, lose each other to gang violence and a twelve-year prison sentence, and reunite. The machinery is familiar. The pulse is faint.

On the matter of social consciousness, this is a period piece in more ways than one. The ensemble includes several performers of North African descent, though that reflects the ordinary demographics of a French production instead of any deliberate statement, and critics observed that the one prominent character of color is consigned to sidekick duty, comic relief, and the absorption of racial slurs. The central romance runs on a conventional smart-girl, bad-boy arrangement, complete with a female lead who is fired from her job by the man who later courts her, a detail reviewers received without warmth. Race is not engaged as a theme. Neither is queerness, nor climate, nor body image, nor neurodivergence. The class contrast between the lovers gestures at economic desperation but never organizes itself into an argument about who profits from it.

What the film lacks in sermonizing it makes up for in volume. There is no preachy messaging here, no moral instruction, no tidy lesson about the way we live now. There is screaming, saturated color, a cringe-worthy hip-hop montage, and a car explosion timed for maximum absurdity. The picture's failure is not ideological. It is a failure of restraint, of chemistry between its adult leads, and of deciding whether it wants to be a musical, a gangster film, or a lament. We are left with a long, loud object that means well and says little.