Heartbeat Detector

I tell everyone: the best thing I ever did was get married, for all of the obvious reasons: my wife is brilliant, smart and always pushes me to be a better and more thoughtful person and I love her for every moment of it and enjoy every second I get to spend with her on Earth. But aside from that reason, I am also just glad to be married so I don’t have to put up with all of the madness that there is involved in dating: nine times out of ten you find that the person who you met and thought was going to be of amazing interest turns out to be nothing more than dull, boring or in some cases even flat out annoying and this is all the more difficult to swallow when they are dressed to the nines and looking beautiful, which is exactly the problem I had when I rented Heartbreak Detector.

Walking through the TLA is kind of like walking the red light district in Amsterdam where basically you’re judging a book by its cover or, in this case, a film by what the front of the DVD case looks like and though there is a little mumbled film description phrase scribbled on the back of those boxes, they are secondary to once you have been drawn in by the box art itself. Picking up Heartbeat Detector, I thought I had in my hands a masterpiece because the cover, same as the poster posted here, is for me simply stunning: a straight, cold and cubed flash of corporate beauty and simplicity along with one of my favorite French actors, Mathieu Amalric being reflected in a steel table causing an uncomfortable harmony.

The film itself begins exactly as I expected from said cover, within the highest ranks of corporate France where a CEO has unexpectedly lost his mind and our hero, a corporate psychologist, is sent in to find out what has happened. Things play out pretty much as I thought they would until somewhere around the half way point where it would almost seem that Nicolas Klotz put down his director’s megaphone and pulled out a soapbox, deciding that it would be infinitely more interesting to preach to his audience about the evils of capitalism than to tell the rest of the story. I was a bit agitated by this because I was really enjoying the movie up to that point and I thought I had made the right decision to review something from the TLA instead of the new Michael Moore movie but now it turns out that that they are one and the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew this was the direction the movie was going to take eventually, the title in French, ‘The Human Question’ told me that much and seeing how it was made in France it wasn’t a terribly shocking moment in my life when the characters living in a country infamous for its political views began discussing the evils of modern capitalism. I have no problem for say with a movie that wants to dabble in that world and by all means a film asking socio-economic issues will always grab my attention but this one goes not only too far but rather drives itself right off a cliff.

It turns out everyone working in the company is formerly associated with the Nazi’s and we begin to get indirect questions about life like ‘is there really any difference between a company that fires alcoholics for the sake of efficiency and what the Nazi’s did?’ and my answer is YES! WHY YES IN FACT THERE IS A DIFFERENCE, AN ENORMOUS DIFFERENCE.

It really gets to me when a film like this is doing so well and then goes off into directions that I simply can’t follow and it bothers me all the more when I want to like the movie: the shots and locations for this film were all perfectly chosen and everything from the simplicity of the costumes to the acting was stellar. I also thoroughly enjoyed the more subtle observances of people working in modern society, the desperate attempts to escape the mundane, the characters’ self-abuse in order to feel something and a bunch of other redundant themes were all well played out.

Sadly it simply isn’t enough to hold the film together, and especially not when it is constantly interrupted with songs, yes songs: there are at least three separate moments in which the film comes to a complete stop and we are submitted to an individual, none of whom are even characters in the movie, singing entire songs for no reason I was ever able to put together though I think that the idea was to show us the softer side of life, that ‘Human Question’ which the French title alludes to. I would certainly hope for the sake of the singers, however, that that isn’t really what was intended because I wasn’t move by them at all, in fact I didn’t like any of the signing and I think that if I were in a position of power and heard someone ruining my moment of peace like that I would be in my right mind to fire them and if they didn’t work for me I would force someone in human resources to get them on the payroll so I could fire them.

The bottom line is that Heartbeat Detector is a film that had a shot at greatness, but got caught up in its own sermon on the evils of living in modern society, focusing far too much on annoyingly simplistic means of story telling like the song scenes and repetitive poetry in order to project and even more vexingly simple message.