#1279: AUDIARD, Jacques: Read My Lips (2001)

AUDIARD, Jacques (France)

Read My Lips [2001]

Spine #1279

Blu-ray

Two outcasts are drawn together by crime and passion in this early tour de force from director Jacques Audiard. Carla (Emmanuelle Devos, who won a César Award for her performance) is an unappreciated, hard-of-hearing employee at a nondescript construction company. Her lonely life gets a jolt of excitement when she hires a new assistant: Paul (Vincent Cassel), an ex-con who soon enlists her (and her lip-reading ability) in a risky scheme. With visceral camera work and sound design, Audiard immerses viewers in the duo’s increasingly turbulent world, blending noir conventions with complex character development for a thriller of unique depth and emotion.

119 minutes

5.1 Surround

Color
in French
1:85:1

Criterion Release 2025

Directors/Writer

Screenplay by Jacques Audiard and Tonino Benacquista.

Jacques Audiard was 49 when he directed Read My Lips.

Other Audiard films in the Collection:

#1280: The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)
#871: Dheepan (2015)

The Film

Audiard loves the ECU … the film is full of ‘em, and they all do what they were intended to do — draw you right into the POV of the character and scenario.

A sign of a really good film is perfected misdirection — the first hour showcases the character (Carla, an award-winning Emmanuelle Devos), mostly in her work environment and it has nothing to do with the main plot point — or is it the other way around? That the real plot is Carla’s life and the rest is cinematic eye-candy?

In any case, Carla’s life is fairly ordinary — she’s an overworked secretary, what else is new? Her (male) bosses are pigs, and — oh, by the way — she can read lips!

Mm-mm, that’s the title of the film. She’s not completely deaf, but reliant on hearing aids. In comes Paul (Vincent Cassel), fresh outta prison, and the film begins to scurry around from one new scenario to the next — until …

**

Cassel — a terrific actor — was a year away from his unforgettable (and at times nearly unwatchable) performance in Gaspar Noé’s mind-blowing 2002 film Irreversible. Paul can be seen as a tune-up for Marcus. Both terrifying performances.

Any film scored by Alexandre Desplat automatically is better. This is no exception. He provides just the right touch and Audiard’s sensibilities afford him great opportunities to punch or float at just the right moment.

Vincendeau (below) talks about the auteur theory. It boils down to creating something singular, unique. A perfect example is Audiard’s camera work during a desperately frenetic scene where Carla is lipreading Paul from a window in the distance. She is understanding him and we are following along … suddenly Audiard’s angle on Paul excludes his lips!

The two characters know what was said, but we — the audience — do not! Hitch couldn’t have done it better.

And certainly not in French.

Film Rating (0-60):

56

The Extras

The Booklet

Twelve-page wraparound featuring an essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau.

“Jacques Audiard is a fascinating case study in the limits of the auteur theory. The hybridity and variety of his films seem to willfully challenge the concept of an auteur with a clearly unified vision. Throughout his career, Audiard has tackled a wide variety of subjects and genres, including the thriller, the western, the romance, and the musical. He has also made movies in an impressive number of languages: in addition to French, his films have featured dialogue in Vietnamese, Arabic, Tamil, Russian, Corsican, Mandarin, English and Spanish. These qualities — along with the fact that he claims influences from a multitude of cultures — have established him as an exemplar of cinéma-monde, a brand of contemporary filmmaking that is not confined by national boundaries. And yet, despite an eclecticism that makes him hard to categorize, the word auteur is still a meaningful and appropriate designation for Audiard, one that reflects the singular and demanding nature of his work, as well as his stylistic and thematic hallmarks.”

Commentary

With actors Cassel and Devos.

The perfect commentary … director’s not needed, his film speaks for itself — but having two magnificent actors here, who are both completely at ease with each other and speak about their film with candor and obvious delight.

Devos points out how the bit with the coffee was scripted.

Cassel: “With Jacques Audiard, you get a well-written script.”

And: “To the French producers and directors who own rights, stop selling them to Americans. Trust yourselves and release the films over there.”

Most interesting is a discussion of how the vous between them evolved into tu.

Afterword

By Audiard.

“Once you recognize the rules of a genre, of film noir, for example, you know how to bend them.”

Program

About the making of the film featuring interviews with Audiard, DP Mathieu Vadepied and Benacquista.

Some great stuff here. Vadepied talks how he uses light to shape the look of the Carla character:

“As the movie progresses, she becomes more beautiful. Her beauty will appear. And that is also made possible by the way she is filmed, by the fact that she dresses differently, the way she acts, the way she speaks — all these things make her beautiful, so the light must follow that organically. It was induced in every scene, the way the character evolves …”

Interview

With composer Desplat.

Deleted scenes

Featuring commentary by Audiard.

The shocking ending originally planned! Would have added 30 minutes to the film.

Trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

56 + 35 =

91

By Director

By Spine #