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Beating Hearts

Local rebellious teenager Clotaire falls for his schoolmate Jackie, but gang violence leads him to a darker destructive path. After years apart, the star-crossed lovers discover that every path they've taken leads them back together.

Top Cast

  • Adèle Exarchopoulos

    Adèle Exarchopoulos

    Jackie

  • François Civil

    François Civil

    Clotaire

  • Mallory Wanecque

    Mallory Wanecque

    Jackie (15 ans)

  • Malik Frikah

    Malik Frikah

    Clotaire (17 ans)

  • Alain Chabat

    Alain Chabat

    Le père de Jackie

  • Benoît Poelvoorde

    Benoît Poelvoorde

    La Brosse

  • Vincent Lacoste

    Vincent Lacoste

    Jeffrey

  • Jean-Pascal Zadi

    Jean-Pascal Zadi

    Lionel adulte

  • Élodie Bouchez

    Élodie Bouchez

    La mère de Clotaire

Overview

Local rebellious teenager Clotaire falls for his schoolmate Jackie, but gang violence leads him to a darker destructive path. After years apart, the star-crossed lovers discover that every path they've taken leads them back together.

Rating

7.2 / 10
1,028 Reviews
2 Popular

1 Reviews

  • CinemaSerf
    CinemaSerf
    7 Aug 22, 2025

    “Clotaire” (Malik Frikah) is the school wide boy who meets his match in the younger “Jacqueline” (Mallory Wanecque) and despite their coming from opposite sides of the tracks, they start to bond. He becomes besotted with her, but rather than buy her her favourite “The Cure” album, he pinches it for her, and that’s just the latest example of his petty criminality that ultimately ends up with him spending ten years incarcerated. When he (now François Civil) comes out of prison, he goes back to his old stomping grounds to get paid and perhaps to hook back up with her, but he finds that nothing he left behind is as it seems and with violence never far from him he knows that change is the only way he can perhaps be reconciled with a “Jackie” (now Adèle Exarchopoulos) who has had not had her own troubles to seek since he went away. She is now living with her boss “Jeffrey” (Vincent Lacoste) but fairly clearly for convenience rather than affection. Can there be a future for the childhood sweethearts? This is a tightly cast and gritty action drama that does follow quite a predictable story arc, but it also does benefit from four really quite impressive performances as it combines the throes of young love with the conflict brought by the sense of the hopeless felt by “Clotaire” as he starts to take the only path he feels is open to him. There isn’t so much dialogue with this, which I think helps, and the 1980s soundtrack also helps give us a sense of their occasion as they mature at different speeds and in wholly different ways. It’s a film that’s about characters rather than their scenario, and though I can’t say I especially enjoyed the fizzling out at the denouement, it’s a solid feature that is worth a watch.

Trailers & Clips

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