Director
Nicholas Klotz's subtle suspense film Heartbeat Detector comes across like a hybrid of Heart Of Darkness and Michael Clayton, digging into the roots of a
psychosis affecting a veteran corporate lackey. Mathieu Amalric plays a human
resources psychologist who's assigned to visit his firm's Paris office, to
assess the sanity of local manager Michael Lonsdale. Amalric has a reputation
among his bosses as a master motivator, so the cover for his trip is that he's
researching whether employees would enjoy a revival of the company's amateur
orchestra. But really he's trying to cozy up to Lonsdale, a former member of
that orchestra, to find out why his productivity has been so lousy lately.
What
Amalric discovers is that the company he works for once earned money by
supplying equipment to some very bad people, and Lonsdale is cracking under the
pressure of keeping the secret. And the more Amalric finds out about it, the
more he starts to break down too. He's especially shaken by reading the
decades-old reports on his predecessors' business, written in the same kind of
dry corporate-speak that he himself uses when he talks about human beings as
"assets" and their work as "performance."
Klotz
and regular screenwriting collaborator Elisabeth Perceval—adapting a
story by François Emmanuel—keep the details of Amalric's psychological
degeneration rooted in the physical. Heartbeat Detector doesn't rush its plot and doesn't
rest everything on its climactic revelations; rather, Klotz and Perceval take
time to observe Amalric chatting up pretty girls and dancing in nightclubs and
interviewing job applicants, all as a way of examining what his class privilege
buys him, before revealing what bought the privilege.
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.
But 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. "Music doesn't tolerate hierarchy," one employee says,
when trying to explain why the company orchestra disbanded. And Heartbeat Detector seems to imply that we should never
trust any institution that would.