Directed
by Jacques Audiard
Starring: Emmanuelle Devos, Olivia Bonamy, Vincent Cassel, Olivier Gourmet,
Olivier Perrier
Written by Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista
Music: Alexandre Desplat Cinematography: Matthieu Vadepied
Jacques Audiard's third feature is a noirish, dysfunctional couple love story.
Ex-con Vincent Cassel and hard of hearing office worker Emmanuelle Devos are
unlikely partners in crime. Carla (Devos) works hard in the office of a property
developer, isolated in the male-dominated environment by her femininity and
partial deafness. Solitude engulfs every aspect of her life: she is loveless,
dowdy, frustrated and abused by colleagues and friends. Increasingly overworked,
she approaches an employment agency for an assistant with certain irregular
requirements: the assistant should be male, friendly, not too small, with fine
hands.
Enter Paul (Cassell), a dishevelled and luckless ex-con, who lies his way into
the position and thus into a curious relationship with Carla. Both have something
the other wants: Paul's energy and sexuality; Carla's intelligence and her ability
to lip-read. Together, they embark on a mini payback spree, first exacting revenge
in the workplace, then graduating into more dangerous crime.
Sur Mes Lèvres is a genre-defying piece, switching from dark social
comedy to visceral full-throttle thriller. Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard
is definitely carving his own niche in French cinema with films that are tinged
with noir, as in See How They Fall (1994), and explore the possibilities
of human change, in A Self Made Hero (1996).
Here he makes another distinctive statement, producing an action-driven plot
fleshed out by an engrossing relationship between two interesting, if unlikeable
characters. Cassel and Devos are astonishingly good, believably capturing the
personality traits and mannerisms of their characters (Devos' Carla is constantly
scowling and adjusting her hearing aids). They're also, crucially, well matched.
Devos' staid ugly duckling is transformed through her exposure to Cassel's dirty-handsome
low-life, while he undergoes a little social tutoring under her cruel tutelage.
The resolutely grim attitude and aesthetic of the film is something to be endured
rather than savoured. However, this is balanced by some surprisingly abstract
and sublime images, outstanding performances and a wonderfully intense use of
sound that confirm Audiard as a man to watch.
FilmFour review.
Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres) was nominated for nine Césars
- the French Oscars - in 2002, including film of the year, best director, best
actor and best actress. It won three.
Best Actress (2002)
César Awards, France - Emmanuelle Devos
Best Sound (2002)
César Awards, France - Cyril Holtz
Best Writing - Original or Adaptation (2002)
César
Awards, France - Jacques Audiard
SUR MES
LEVRES
(READ MY LIPS)
A film directed by Jacques Audiard. Written by Audiard and Tonino Benacquista.
Running time: 115 minutes. In French with English subtitles.
Carla Bhem: Emmanuelle Devos
Paul Angeli: Vincent Cassel
Marchand: Olivier Gourmet
Masson: Olivier Perrier
Annie: Olivia Bonamy
REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT
(Warning: This review tells a fair amount, but not all, of the plot)
Carla is an office worker whose hearing is impaired, and who can read lips.
This skill is crucial in a late scene in "Read My Lips," a thriller
crossed with a psycho-sexual study. Without giving away surprises, I can say
that by reading the lips of Paul, her partner in crime, she is able to reverse
a tricky situation. But "Read My Lips" is not a simple-minded movie
in which merely being able to read lips saves the day. In this brilliant sequence,
she reads his lips and that allows them to set into motion a risky chain of
events based on the odds that the bad guys will respond predictably.
By this point in the movie, we are deep into crime, double-crosses, beatings
and murder, but "Read My Lips" begins as the story of an office worker--one
of those hapless souls who is hardly noticed by the co-workers who leave their
half-empty coffee cups on her desk. Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) is in her 30s,
with ordinary looks; she seems to exist as an invisible service to others. She
has no social life, has neighbours who dump their kids for baby-sitting, and
lives in a world of shouts and whispers, depending on the function of her hearing
aids. Apparently (it is a little unclear) she was once more deaf than she is
now, and is improving.
Carla would like a guy. Her boss suggests she hire an assistant, and immediately
we sense her mind at work. What kind of an assistant would she like? A man.
What attributes should he have? Nice hands. She eventually hires the spectacularly
shaky job candidate Paul (Vincent Cassel), who is fresh out of jail, sleeps
rough, has one set of clothes and, I guess, nice hands. He owes his job to her,
and so she treats him a little like the others in the office treat her. There
is a sexual undercurrent, complicated because they are both unwilling to seem
needy.
Paul has not completely cut his connections to the criminal element in the French
city where they live. He moonlights as a bartender, has snaky deals on the side,
and finds out almost by accident about a bag of loot that's ripe for the stealing.
He can't pull off the job by himself, and enlists Carla, who turns out to have
that combination of cunning and hostility that makes successful criminals. Spying
on the men with the money, who belong to a dangerous local gang, she perches
on a rooftop and uses binoculars to read their lips and discover their plans.
The details of the heist are nicely worked out, and original, as these things
go. But the heist is not the point of "Read My Lips." It is more of
a Macguffin. The bag and the bad guys are simply the props to justify the way
Paul and Carla take their relationship to a new level--how they find, in this
dangerous enterprise, a way to use unsuspected skills and discover deep compatibility.
Neither Carla, in her office, nor Paul, in his desultory lawlessness, would
have ever broken loose and discovered their true potential without the other.
That discovery provides another example of the depth of the screenplay, by director
Jacques Audiard and Tonino Benacquista. Just as the lip-reading is not a payoff
but a setup, so the relationship of Carla and Paul is not about obvious sex
but about a communion of two souls--and sex. A lesser movie would have had them
in bed by the halfway mark, in an obligatory sex scene of little motivation,
interest or purpose. Instead, "Read My Lips" is really interested
in these two characters. At first they have a simultaneous attraction and repulsion;
each finds it sexy that the other one behaves with a certain competitive hostility.
Then they share the goal of the crime, which has its own fascination and fulfills
both of their natures. And only then, through that experience, do they make
a delightful discovery that at deeply buried levels they are connected, in a
world where they have never met anyone who feels as they feel.
It is nothing to discover that another person turns you on; that's commonplace.
But to discover that you and another person are mutually turned on by deep instincts
you bring out in each other--instincts involving the very way you live your
lives--is rare, and makes you tremble with joy and risk the unthinkable. "Read
My Lips" is not about deafness, lip-reading, crime or sex, but about that
discovery; the plot simply provides the rails on which it rides.
Chicago
Sun-Times Inc. July 19, 2002