The French Remake a U.S. Film: “I always thought Fingers felt like a French film, anyway,’ says James Toback, who wrote and directed it and who now, 27 years later, is enjoying the strange experience of seeing Fingers become French not just in feeling but in fact.

Jacques Audiard’s film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which relocates Mr. Toback’s violent, willfully unstable psychodrama from 70’s New York to 21st-century Paris, has to be one of the unlikeliest remakes in the history of the movies, and not only because The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is actually a strong picture in its own right. It’s also unusual in that the original film is not the sort of proven, marketable commodity that generally inspires (if that’s the word) the urge to remake: Fingers was a box-office flop in the United States, and although it attracted some critical enthusiasm in France, it quickly, Mr. Audiard says, ‘fell into a kind of purgatory’ – largely forgotten and rarely revived. And it’s practically unheard of for a French filmmaker to redo an American movie. Even the auteurs of the French New Wave maintained a reverential, hands-off attitude toward the work of their Hollywood idols; they contented themselves with homages, fleeting evocations of the manner, rather than the matter, of the movies they loved.” (New York Times )