Heartbeat Detector.

"Before it reaches its end, Heartbeat Detector winds its epistemological way through discussions of historical amnesia, the decay of language, and the soullessness of technology," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "It's an unapologetic film of ideas—perhaps the headiest of its kind to arrive on these shores since Godard's Notre Musique.... For two and a half hours, [Nicolas] Klotz walks a perilous tightrope between profundity and pretension without ever tipping into the chasm."

"As satire, the film lacks bite, but it generates some measure of good will from its utter strangeness—that is, until a pretentious historical dialogue rises to the surface and the film is gripped by a punishing inscrutability," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

Updated through 3/19.

"A corporate mystery with a horrific answer, this French neo-melodrama opens on to an evergreen avenue of insight: the insidious continuity of Western civilization, and especially language, with its 20th-century nadir," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

Earlier: James Van Maanen and reviews from Cannes.

Updates: "Shot mainly in drab green and brown office spaces and the bars Simon haunts after hours, Heartbeat Detector leads down a rabbit hole of revelations that finally appear to equate multinational companies with fascism," writes Jürgen Fauth. "The analogy is strained to say the least - not even lefty documentaries like The Corporation go quite as far - and finally distracts from what began as a clear-eyed portrait of a complex, contradictory character."

"In the last several years, moviegoers have been inundated with films - narrative and documentary features alike - that depict the decaying soul of the individual in the service of corporate ambition, but I can recall no such work as dark or morose as Heartbeat Detector," writes Chet Mellema in Reverse Shot. "While unquestionably sincere in its efforts to suggest that personal choices in furtherance of institutional progress can and do have dire consequences - not only for the decision maker but also, and especially, the nameless victims of such choices - Klotz's film is a challenging slog, and it falls far short of compelling cinema."

Updates, 3/15: "Intriguing, frustrating, exasperating - the French film Heartbeat Detector succeeds best as a provocation," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Swamped by abstractions, the film can only gesture toward the obvious: capitalism kills, people do too."

"Heartbeat Detector can be a chilly film, and its attempts to find moral equivalency between the crimes of history and the injustices of modern business practices don't always pan out," writes Noel Murray at AV Club. "But [Mathieu] Amalric gives another in a recent string of riveting performances, and Klotz gets a lot of play out of the ironic distance between musical expression and corporate rigor."

"Though not as dreadfully pretentious as Mr Klotz's best-known film, The Bengali Night - which had a young Hugh Grant learning the deep, dark secrets of India — Heartbeat Detector is too intent on proclaiming itself an intellectual film," writes Darrell Hartman in the New York Sun.

Update, 3/19: "If you're a fan of Hitchcock, of Kubrick, of the kind of thriller that has the implacable mystery of great sculpture or great architecture, of movies that create their own visual, aural and symbolic universe and suck you bodily into them - well, you've simply got to see this," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

Posted by dwhudson at March 12, 2008 9:27 AM