Film: Read My Lips
Release date: 6th September 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 115 mins
Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Devos, Olivier Gourmet, Olivier Perrier, Olivia Bonamy
Genre: Crime/Drama/Romance/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France
Audiard has made waves with his twist on the crime genre. If A Prophet was the film that made his name, then Read My Lips is the film that first got him recognised. After A Self Made Hero and See How They Fall in the mid-90s, this 2001 release went on to cause a huge buzz in France. With Cesar nominations and awards galore, Audiard creates a probing look at the not so pretty side of Paris that has gone on to become his trademark.
Carla is a thirty-something office worker in central Paris. She is single and deaf with only a hearing aid to give her partial hearing. When she faints at work, Carla is offered an office assistant to help with her workload in the building industry. The agency sends her an attractive young man named Paul for the position - an ex-convict desperate to make an honest living whilst he is on parole.
Paul starts work, shakily struggling to get to grips with the office environment that is so foreign to him. When Carla finds him spending the night in one of the store rooms, she offers him a place to stay, giving him the keys to a flat in one of the company’s unfinished buildings. In response to Carla’s charity, Paul makes a sexual advance on her, but she turns him down much to his frustration.
Carla’s timid nature is not only affecting her personal relationships but is getting her no respect in her job - she has the ability to lip read and constantly picks up on her cruel colleague’s snipes and jeers about her. When she is overlooked for a lucrative opportunity at work, she asks Paul to help her get an upper hand on her disrespectful superiors, and he reluctantly steals files that help her seal a big deal with one of the company’s partners.
When Paul is called up by club owner Marchand, he is forced to leave the office to repay his debt, and Marchand makes him a bar-man at his club. When Paul dreams up a plan to scam Marchand, he calls Carla back into his life. He has thought up a plan to use Carla’s lip reading, and it’s time she repays him for his help...
Audiard is a director whose heart lies in his roots. Parisian born, Audiard is dedicated to telling stories in the backdrop of his home city. The French capitol is famed for its beauty and iconic scenery, but in Audiard’s Paris there is rarely a postcard picture in site - he surrounds his films with run-down buildings, dank city streets and ominous night life. This bleak version of the city is not an entirely new concept when considering the realism of classics like Irreversible and La Haine but Audiard installs an atmosphere entirely of his own.
He does this by portraying the mundane struggle of the inner-city as well it’s very exciting dangers. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped we saw the daily bump and grind of a real estate broker, in A Prophet the solitude of prison, and here the utterly dull routine of office work. Audiard’s world is an uncomfortable place to be, as it displays an air of discontent and turmoil in surroundings that are bleak with a capital B.
This discontent is felt most strongly here by Carla. She is an oddball whose behaviour is more empathetic than it is endearing - scenes of her stood naked in the mirror show her longing with agonising pain. She is an outcast as much for her timid nature as she is for her deafness - subsequently she is unappreciated by friends, disrespected by co-workers but also intriguing to Paul. With themes of crime and the complexity of the heist the two dream up, it is their relationship that is the film’s main drive and most appealing arc.
Their relationship is something all together uncomfortable and fascinating to watch. It evolves with a tension that is both sexual and emotional - Audiard puts his main focus on the complexity of his characters. The two leads are a most unlikely pairing, but what they lack in common ground they make up for with a shared vulnerability and lack of social place.
This leads to them having the most bizarre of cinematic understandings. They show a fair amount of contempt for each other also - their relationship is heated stemming from an early advance from Paul which is aggressive and entirely miscalculated. However, throughout the course of the film, we see how their extreme differences compensate for each other’s shortcomings. We see Paul defend Carla against an attacker in the same way we see Carla lying for Paul to his parole officer. They are two characters that alone are hopeless but together are something extremely special.
The romance is central to the film but the crime-drama motif that features is also done with the upmost conviction. Paul’s scam is simple but engrossingly risky. Working in a bar for Marchand, he is sent to deliver bottles of champagne to his boss and two of his shady associates in a flat opposite the club. He steals a copy of the key and tells Carla to watch and lip read the gang’s moves so they can steal the expectedly large riches they bring back to the flat. As Carla sits on a rooftop clad with a sleeping bag and binoculars, you can’t help but think of Rear Window - it is the tension and discomfort of watching them carry out their plan that truly matches the suspense of a Hitchcock film.
Emmanuelle Devos won the Cesar award for her performance, and it is a treat to see a strong female role stand out in Audiard’s work. He has made a habit of revolving his films around strong male leads, such as Roman Duris and, more recently, Tahar Rahim, but despite a great turn by the consistently watchable Cassel, it is Devos who really stands out here. Supported by a fantastic script, she plays the part as a timid loner for whom we feel every blow and put down, but simultaneously feel every piece of progress she makes.
For fans of A Prophet, this is a film you should strive to see. Audiard starts here his attack on the crime drama with a piece that is daringly erotic, entirely compelling and, despite its grim facade, beautiful. LW
