03/17/08
Text: Scott Indrisek
Cinema is no stranger to the Holocaust; artists have been imagining, investigating, and occasionally exploiting this historical tragedy for decades. Yet Heartbeat Detector, a new film starring French sensation Mathieu Amalric (Diving Bell & The Butterfly, Kings and Queen) approaches its subject matter from a quite unique angle, focusing on the lingering guilt of European corporations who benefited from or actively participated in the Final Solution. Amalric plays an in-house psychologist for the fictitious SC Farb, a firm that is still reeling from a round of devastating lay-offs that he was instrumental in implementing. The film compares the dead, dishonest language of corporate life with the similarly debased language of the Nazis—both devalue human life, and both couch their violence in a seemingly innocent vocabulary. (While some have argued otherwise, director Nicolas Klotz isn’t equating Nazi crimes with corporate downsizing; like so many things, it’s a matter of semantics). Heartbeat Detector is a gruelingly intense masterpiece that fluctuates between the business world and the after-hours lives of overworked employees, with the stuffed-shirt life of the office giving way to sex-drenched raves and a succession of brilliantly choreographed party scenes.
Amalric—who we personally think is the most tragically hip character actor to grace the screen since Terence Stamp in the late 60s—is currently down in Panama, where he’s filming the next installment of the James Bond franchise. (He’ll play the villain Dominic Greene in Quantum of Solace, out in November). We called him up to talk about Heartbeat Detector—currently in US theaters—as well as suicide in France, burlesque dancers, and the violence that language often hides.
I don’t know if you’ve had a corporate office job in France, but would you say that SC Farb is typical of a French corporation?
Nicolas [Klotz, the director] didn’t ask me to go spend six months in a real company to know exactly how it really worked. I wanted to do that but he said ‘No, this is not what I’m looking for’. And as you can notice in the film it’s really fiction because sometimes you don’t know really [know] in what time you are. Some location[s] look like the 60s, sometimes you feel that you are [in modern times]. It’s not naturalistic, it’s not a documentary. Even the way we speak is very, very ‘written’ and all that.
[In a company] it’s always dangerous to say what you really think. You have to disguise, and you have to smile or shut up. That’s the best way to be powerful in France sometimes. We’re not asking people to be human sometimes. There’s a big company in France [where] there has been six suicides in two years and they are asking themselves ‘Why? What’s happening?’ There’s a lot of suicides in companies in France.
It’s funny because coming from the States we tend to look at France as a much more ideal place for workers. You have all this vacation, the state provides for you…so it’s interesting to hear you say this.
With the right wing now even stronger, unions don’t have that much power and solidarity. It’s very difficult. They just fired 20,000 teachers for next year. I don’t know what the thing is about France. We feel things really are tough, very tough.
You might be becoming more like us Americans, maybe.
Yes, but we don’t have the same story. We don’t have your energy. We don’t have your belief. We don’t have this thing about hope. We don’t have any hope, I think.
France doesn’t have any hope?
In France people hope that things won’t change! The story of America is completely different; it’s something completely different. The racism in France, it’s so different. I think the thing is really how people use words. In France we use a lot of American [business] words that seem modern—like managing. In fact, under those words there are violent acts.
