Avis des critiques

Audiard's exquisitely elegant thriller is notable for its fresh, exploratory approach to genre. On one level, it's another bracing French film about the workplace, but filtered through Hitchcockian stylistic and thematic tropes.

This is really a terrifically interesting film. Written by director Jacques Audiard in collaboration with Tonino Benacquista, the film revels in the ambiguities of Carla's character. She's not immediately immensely likeable. And nor is Paul for that matter. The film is really about their mutual empowerment.

Audiard and co-writer Tonino Benacquista strike a few craft problems in trying to sustain our interest in the narrative machinations, while at the same time keeping the complex psychological portraits of the characters front and centre.

Technically, Read My Lips is exciting to watch: The audio disruptions of Carla putting in or taking out her hearing aids and the inventiveness of the way the heist plot is revealed are just a couple of the film's treats. This is only Audiard's third film, but it should put him in the top ranks of international filmmakers.

On the surface it may be low-key and staid, but in fact it's a movie that rapidly unfolds with no undue introspection. Enjoyable in the moment, it seems even better in retrospect, as the peculiar, half-lighted world that filmmaker Jacques Audiard has created drifts back into the mind.

After a while, Read My Lips becomes a far more conventional thriller, as the two stop circling around each other and instead pursue a garbage bag filled with stolen cash. Lips never quite returns to its original form, and a much more memorable film gets lost in the process.

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.

Above all else Audiard, who has a novelist’s gift for creating personalities, is an intensely curious investigator of psychological states. He’s fascinated with character, with who people are versus who they imagine themselves to be in the private corners of their minds

Though there are a few scenes of violence, the movie operates on a spreading and deepening sense of unease. The payoff comes in the last 20 minutes, as sustained and tense a sequence as any thriller of recent years.

Like so many European pictures these days, ''Read My Lips'' seems destined to be remade in Hollywood... Its ingenuity will not be hard to replicate, but its gritty immersion in the petty indignities of working life - something of a French specialty in recent years - is unlikely to survive. It is this quality that gets under your skin and turns its two beleaguered losers into genuine outlaw heroes.

The film’s logistical failures as a suspense thriller say less about Audiard’s neo-noir capabilities than they do about the film’s success as character drama.

If Read My Lips' thriller and relationship elements come together at the end with a neatness many a well-doctored Hollywood screenplay would envy, the film nevertheless leaves us with a deliberate, nagging inconclusiveness.