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Tom (Romain Duris), the protagonist of Jacques Audiard’s brilliant remake of James Toback’s 1978 Fingers, mourns the days when he played the piano, a legacy of his deceased mother, herself a concert pianist. Now he works in real estate, a business, as he tells a teacher at an aborted audition, that consists of planting rats in the apartments of unwanted tenants and working over squatters with a baseball bat. That profession is the legacy of his father, an over-the-hill deal maker whose foiled schemes Tom is called on to back up with his muscle. Audiard’s jagged, vérité-like style and Duris’s performance — evoking not so much Harvey Keitel’s in Toback’s film as a combination of the Keitel and Robert De Niro characters in Mean Streets — transcend the story’s absurdities.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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