Read My Lips (2001)

I'm trying to spread the Audiard thinly over this year...  It's been 2months since I watched The Beat My Heart Skipped. I wasn't as take with that as i was with his colossally majestic, A Prophet but as i said before, it was pretty darn good and A Prophet is an extremely high watermark, in my eyes. For me, Read My Lips is another step down 'The Beat...' But is still incredibly original and Audiard has sweated out another modern-day example of Stanislavsky-status acting- this time from lead actress, Emmanuelle Devos.
Read My Lips is the story of an relatively deaf and dowdy office manager and the ex-Con she hires to assist her at work, played by Vincent Cassel. Gee... Vincent Cassel. I love that man. I even love saying his name in an overt French lilt, 'Vin-senca-ssselle'. In this movie, he's kinda 'playing-the-wall' - he's not really do that intense brooding sex asteroid, he normally plays; his character in this is just a bit of a impotent doof. A wannabe Cassel. I that it means something that he can tone it down and play a lighter version of the usual alpha-male you might expect but... hmmph. I guess you could argue that this is not this film is less about his character and more about Devos' character, Carla. Carla is a woman struggling to have the things, that seem to come naturally to others like love, excitement and respect. She feels constantly self-conscious because of her hearing disability. So when she's given the opportunity to have an assistant, she immediately sees it as an opportunity to use to hire some exciting companion. Preferably tall and handsome, what she get is this malnourished excuse for a Cassel, who she's fully prepared to dismiss until he tells her that he'd been released from being inside.
Inside where? She asks.
What are you shitting me?, the bad-teenage moustaches Cassel says. Snort. I can't imagine any French person using the phrase 'are you shittng me?'. The subtitling dept. at Pathe must be having me on.
But they develop this bond, where they begin to depend on each other and though the air of potential coupling is likely, their relationship develops from a working one to a friendly one and so on. But Devos is really brilliant. She just gives everything and is completely self-less in this part. She's half-manipulator and half-victim.
In the end, I guess what's lacking in the film is not that it's necessarily aimless but that the plotting seems obtuse, there's this thing about stealing some local hood's money, in the 3rd act and Carla has to use her power of lip-reading to get answers so they can steal it but you don't really care. It seems wrought and over-the-top and unlike the tone of the rest of the film. But I'll keep going back through Audiard's ouvre and it means he does get better with each proceeding movie....