But a chance encounter in the street with his old music teacher, an eminent music impresario, opens up our view of him. His mother, long dead, was a professional musician, and his old teacher's continuing trust in his ability reawakens the longing for music.

He engages to learn a piece so he can attend an audition with his old teacher, and begins to take lessons with the shy but increasingly masterly Miao Lin (Linh Dan Pham), recently arrived from the Peking Conservatoire, the only common language between them being music and gesture, all the while continuing his seedy life on the streets and grudgingly going along with his father's way of life. But the two worlds are never going to be able to co-exist, and loyalties to his overbearing father threaten to destroy his clean vision of a new life. Duris is great, still the sullen nervy guy while he's operating in his father's world, but now full of a coiled energy that is increasingly finding its way out in the mixture of discipline and feelings that his music brings.
 
At the heart of the film is the father-child relationship - its stall is set out in the brief opening sequence where Fabrice  (Jonathan Zaccai), whom we are later to get to know as Thomas's brutish partner in violence, talks emotionally to Thomas about looking after his dying father - how the child/parent relationship eventually gets to be reversed. Thomas is locked into his father's life, both as a dutiful son, but also becoming the parent figure, like a disapproving father when confronted with his father's choice of a much younger fiancée (a small role played to perfection by Emmanuelle Devos), and physically defending him when things go badly wrong in the gangster world in which he's still, rather past his sell-by date, involved.
 
It's a masterly film by one of France's brightest new directors, whose previous SUR MES LEVRES coupled the dreary tedium of office life and unprepossessing characters with a story of unexpected suspense. Audiard is very good at letting us get to know and feel attachment to people who at first seem to have nothing going for them, and equally good at grounding his stories in the recognisably real world. Here we see a Paris of greasy cafes, mean streets and cramped immigrant squats, cheek by jowl with the comfortable middle class milieus of the concert hall and smart flats.
 
And when we think Thomas has made the break for his own freedom, another chance encounter in the street, cleverly and poignantly mirroring the earlier one, looks set to send him back again into the old, ugly world. And so he makes his choice.

See at Tyneside Cinema, December 2005