Hearbeat Detector (La Question Humaine) directed by Nicolas Klotz
© Trinity Filmed Entertainment
What a strange film. Kessler, played by Mathieu Amalric, is a psychologist working in the Paris office of a German chemical firm, when he's asked by a senior manager to investigate the behaviour and state of mind of the chief executive, Jüst. As he gets closer to his subject the shared past of this concern becomes more mysterious to us as well as to Kessler; and it becomes clear that everyone - Kessler, too - is damaged by their past. It's a film not easily summarised in terms of plot but which generates a strange, increasingly oppressive atmosphere. I enjoyed it, at least for most of the two and a bit hours it lasts.
I liked the way the script refuses to explain what Kessler is doing dancing in an abandoned warehouse with young colleagues and ex-girlfriends: we're left to piece together the shards of this man's emotional life. And overall, although Kessler is in shot nearly all the length of the film - every scene contains him, or nearly, to the textent that I began to wodner about the symmetry of his eyes - we begin to realise we neither understand not know him, the growing realisation of this disconnect revealing a clever filmic play with what in fiction I'd call third person narration. We think we inhabit the mental world of the character we see most, in cinema: but Heartbeat Detector subverts that in the way its screenplay and direction combine. What relationship did Kessler have with the secretary, Isabelle, he kisses down in the archive? Or with the young man he interviews early on? He is as unknown as any of the other characters. I also enjoyed the daring way the film lingered on undramatic scenes - a song, for example, which outlasted our expectations considerably. In some ways Heartbeat Detector is a subtly successful experimental film.
The effect is spoiled at the end, though, by a dimly insistent and portentous moral message. I'm not against political art, or an argument that modern corporate life in some ways squeezes out our humanity. I'm not even against bringing in the Holocaust (though it's one of those lazy wheel-ons that bring instant significance, like child abuse). I can even forgive the ill-judged and wholly disproportionate implied comparison between mass redundancy and genocide. But I did feel in those last, excessive twenty to thirty minutes that something pedagogical and sharp was being repeatedly hammered into my skull; and it hurt. The title, too, I'm afraid to say, is a highly selective translation meant to intensify, to an English-speaking audience, the message and he moral of the film's final section. But I didn't want the pain in my head intensified. La Question Humaine is a better title and more respectful of audience intelligence.
A shame because of the haunting effect of the first hundred minutes.
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