'De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté' ('The Beat that my Heart Skipped') is another superb and delicate character-driven film from French writer/director Jacques Audiard ('Read My Lips') and his collaborator Tonino Benacquista. How this director can take such potentially fragile subjects and create enormously powerful and indelible characters would indicate that he is one of cinema's truly important artists.<br /><br />The story evolves as Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris) is seen as a member of a real estate scam working with smarmy associates who buy and sell buildings at the expense and eviction of poor tenants. The work is distasteful but Thomas is following the lead of his father Robert (Niels Arestrup), a man on the skids who depends on Thomas to do his 'collections'. Thomas loathes the work but is devoted to his rundown father. We discover that Thomas' mother, a former concert pianist, is dead when Thomas encounters his old piano teacher who urges him to practice despite his ten year absence from playing and to audition for a new career. A light of hope goes on in Thomas' psyche and he is lead to a Chinese immigrant pianist Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham) who takes him on as a pupil to prepare him for his anticipated audition.<br /><br />As Thomas practices, his world of crime does not abate and he is intermittently pulled away from his passion for the piano by his old partners as well as his father's continuing need for his 'dirty services'. He is torn between the life he has been leading and the promises of a career with his mother's (and his) passion for beauty in music. When the partition tenuously separating these dual lives is broken, Thomas struggles to find his way back to music. The ending is unexpected and keeps in step with the verismo of the screenplay.<br /><br />Romain Duris is a major talent and delivers the kind of performance that indicates he is becoming a powerhouse of an actor. But the real star of the film is the director who knows how to relate a glimpse of a man's life in subtle, quiet ways despite the accompanying background of violence. It is a delicate balance and Jacques Audiard makes it work. Highly recommended. Grady Harp