"Music is a virus," company HR guy Simon is informed by his girlfriend early on in Nicolas Kotz's Heartbeat Detector, based on the novel by Francois Emmanuel. In case we missed the point, one of Simon's superiors later reminds him, "music doesn't tolerate hierarchy." Their warnings are entirely astute: music -- in a number of incarnations from techno to fado to violin quartets -- is the catalyst of Simon's slow disintegration.
Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) plays the reserved but effective company man whose story could be described as an impressionistic version of Tom Wilkinson's breakdown in Michael Clayton: burdened with one morally questionable task too many, his place in the corporate hierarchy begins to crumble and cave. Trained as a psychologist and experienced as the hatchet man who skillfully picked criteria for a large-scale "restructuring," Simon is asked by the sinister Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) to investigate the CEO, Mathias Jüst (Michael Londsdale), who has been acting peculiar.
Prone to crying fits and paralyzing sorrow, Jüst is likely to become a liability for the company, and cunning Simon knows just how to get close to the the grumbling, directorial boss of it all: Jüst used to play in a company string quartet, and Simon proposes to reconstitute the outfit. Simon balances his day job with weekend seminars that devolve into drunken escapades, and between the house music and the decades-old quartet recordings, Simon stumbles upon truths about the company's history that shake him profoundly.
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. Obsessed with anonymous letters that detail the engineering of a truck custom-build for the Holocaust, Simon becomes a stand-in for Nazis who hid behind their orders while they carried out genocide. 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.
Heartbeat Detector opens on March 14, 2008.
