On demand: "Beating Hearts/L'Amour Ouf"

Gilles Lellouche's expansive melodrama Beating Hearts found itself overshadowed at Cannes 2024 by the red-carpet razzle dazzle of Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez: this is the better movie, but only by virtue of being rote rather than a novelty dud. The not unpromising idea is to update Romeo & Juliet to an industrial French backwater at the start of the 1980s; Lellouche opens with the bloody fallout from a gang war, then flashes back to unpick the roots of the conflict. Clotaire (played first by Malik Frikah, later François Civil) is a skinhead from a broken home, introduced shouting abuse at the girls getting off the school bus; Jacqueline (Mallory Wanecque, then Adèle Exarchopoulos), sensible daughter of petit-bourgeois TV repairman Alain Chabat, is the one who calls this loudmouth out, then stops him dead in his tracks. As noted by the Cannes first responses - broadly characterised as l'amour bof, to riff on the original title - it's not without its limitations. Two hours forty-five seems a long time once you twig the downward spiral of blood and tears everybody's headed towards, and it's a pity the four credited screenwriters, including Lellouch and Happening director Audrey Diwan, forever seem more interested in him than her. (Possibly because a boy drifting in and out of a life of crime is generally going to provide more exciting material than a girl looking wistfully out of a window, as la petite Jackie does.)

There are compensations along the way, but then you're always aware we need compensating for the superficial handling of this scenario. It's been dynamically shot by sometime Luc Besson go-to Laurent Tangy, stuffing cherishable detail and texture - teenage mixtapes, the fleck wallpaper of rundown drinking holes - into often striking widescreen compositions, and thereby conjuring some glancing feel for the sort of nowheresville that might have inspired a Springsteen or Billy Joel song of the period. And while the drama rarely feels anything other than preordained, some choice Eighties soundtrack cuts (notably The Cure's "A Forest" and Billy Idol's "Eyes Without A Face", songs that have had four decades to gather meaning) keep it all broadly more atmospheric than whatever Emilia Pérez was attempting. Beyond that, it's gains and losses. A couple of good scenes in the back end, involving the friendly participation of Benoît Poelvoorde (as the crimeboss who sells Clotaire down the river) and Élodie Bouchez (as Clotaire's maman), follow far too many set-ups that hammer away artlessly on the same three plot points; Exarchopoulos and Civil form an exceptionally handsome couple who spend almost the entire second half getting beaten up in some way. More exhausting than exhilarating, all told - and it does seem a terribly adolescent film to have been written and directed by a fiftysomething.

Beating Hearts is streaming via MUBI from today.