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The awkwardly-titled Heartbeat Detector visually borrows from the spate of American films
that satirized the rise of ethically-challenged post-war corporate culture, from Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to
Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. But in a darker twist, this French film updates a philosophical exposé of how today’s European capitalism
developed out of fascism.
Comparable to what the legal fixer faces in Michael Clayton, Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric) is an industrial psychologist in the human
resources department of the French subsidiary of SC Farb, a German chemical conglomerate. He helps headquarters meet its goals of maximum efficiency
and profit by smoothly engineering lay-offs during restructurings, recruiting young people to replace older managers, and conducting team-building
seminars that feature the latest motivational exercises. The company’s German managing director Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) assigns Simon to
secretly evaluate the sanity of the symbolically named Mathias Jüst, a mesmerizing Michael Lonsdale as the very model of the modern major CEO.
Simon’s ruse, researching the history of the company’s disbanded string quartet, turns into a mystery as, one by one, he identifies, interviews,
and uncovers the secrets of the former members.
While the narration and story are faithful to the novella (the original French title literally translates as The Human Question, though
published in English as The Quartet), the visuals and music add pointed commentary and illustrate Simon’s emotions as he reels from the
strain of his investigation. Set against Joseé Deshaies’s metallic cinematography, awashed in steely blues and grays, Simon and his
“corporate soldiers,” as he calls them, are a robotic army of men-in-black junior executives, recalling the look of the band Joy Divison. Some of the
musical selections, though, are too
heavy-handed, such as a long sequence of Simon listening to a flamenco lament, evoking the persecution of Gypsies.
With the fictional corporation a thinly-veiled ghost of the Nuremberg-condemned IG Farben (the film includes the book’s quotations from that
company’s actual documents), the final plot payoff is a bit too much like the secrets of Inside Man and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader,
currently being adapted to film by Stephen Daldry. But this is less a based-on-a-true-story of corporate intrigue than an exploration of the continuing
impact of the sins of the fathers that eerily follows the same route as the documentary Primo Levi’s Journey through the European economy from
World War II to the present. (Japanese executives appear as reminders of past and present globalization.)
Some may be turned off by the film’s cold, clinical treatment as too intellectual. But this film can be seen as a companion piece to Claude Miller’s
romance A Secret (opening later this year in the U.S.), also with Amalric as a very similar narrator but with more saturated family
memories of the war and post-war years in France.
Nora Lee Mandel
March 14, 2008
