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....

The Beat my Heart Skipped (2005)

This post will concern the thing where you find an amazing piece of art and/or artist and you in back to see what they did before hand; their back-catalogue. 
The artist/art in question is Jacques Audiard and 'A Prophet'. I saw 'A Prophet' about this time last year maybe earlier but it was good enough for me to remember it at the end of the year as one of the years best. It might not be the best gangster movie ever BUT it is the best prison movie ever...
Anyway, to The Beat my Heart Skipped- all i ask is that it be half as good as 'A Prophet'. But that's a pretty big ask...

No, it's not as good as A Prophet but few things are. It is very good though. I don't know how but Audiard just seems to be able to siphen these stellar performances out of his leading actors- Romain Duris is brilliant. He plays a thuggish property developer,making people leave their homes and them buying the real estate for a song. At the same time, he decides to take up the piano again, 10years after playing and his concert pianist mother died. We know he's still greiving his mother when he reacts poorly to finding out his father (Niels Arestrup in a similar role to A Prophet) is remarrying. Almost immediately after returning to piano, he becomes obsessed with becoming a concern musician like his mother and sets an audition with his mother's manager and starts getting lessons from a Chinese pianist- who doesn't speak any French.
As you can see- Audiard- not a fan of a simple straightforward plot.

So now, Duris playing Tom, is juggling his corrupt work life and obsessively practising the same piece on the piano. The way his obsession manifests it's self is best described this way- the plays the same piece of music in the same way, you'd replay a level on a videogame until you complete it. You're so close and yet you're never disappointed enough to stop when you go back to the start.
Meanwhile in his worklife as a way of getting back at his best friend whos screwed him on a deal, HE starts screwing his wife while he's out screwing the other female population of Paris. Apart from revenge, it's not really clear why he does this or tell her he loves her or makes her tell him that she loves him. Tom's just an extreme sorta bloke, sometimes seemingly just doing things for effect like threatening dangerous Russian gangsters and having sex with head gangsters 'moll'. It's hard to describe why Tom is such an interesting character. He's self righteous and arrogant but you could also say that was focus and naivety. Maybe childish is a fair compromise.
Like i said at the start, The Beat... isn't as great as A Prophet and i'd put that down to storytelling. What's great about his films is that Audiard gives his audience a lot of credit for filling in the gaps but i think there's a bit too much of that going on here. I think we need to know more about Tom and his motivation but i couldn't say that it's ever confusing or boring.
And to think this is all loosely based on James Toback's Fingers. I was actually given that movie a few years ago and it's horrible; like Mean Streets on ketamine but Audiard is so brilliant... I'd queue to watch him reimagine Barney's Big Adventure.


I watched The Beat my Heart Skipped (2005) on DVD via LoveFilm.My 2011 in Movies will return with The Mechanic (2010)...