Read My Lips 4K 2001

The two main characters are Carla, a secretary (played by the lovely Emmanuelle Devos), who is completely overwhelmed by loneliness, and a mustachioed man with a negative prison past and a painfully simple name, Paul (Vincent Cassel, in one of his best roles) — meet one day in the model office of a construction company, go to a snack bar across the street, and after that never part for more than a day. For some reason, she gives him a job, an apartment, and a substantial wad of cash. He changes her — making her more tangible, real, and beautiful. Carla has very poor hearing—she wears a hearing aid and can read lips. Paul has a hard time adapting—he has debts and daily visits to the police station. Together, with the help of a suitcase full of someone else's money, they decide to secure a bright and carefree future for themselves, but at the last moment, as usual, everything goes wrong.

Read My Lips by Jacques Audiard, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes for The Prophet, is a terrifyingly powerful film and definitely the best film I've seen in recent times. It's not new, but it's very similar to someone's extremely successful debut. It is not so much a crime drama as a sensual, sentimental reportage, not so much about sex as about breathing, the intimate movement of lips, a farewell sigh. While the heroes of the screen try to clear away the days cluttered with junk, Jacques Audiard makes a film about how important a specific moment is, words spoken in a second, maddened eyes with a glimmer of hope in a moment of danger. There is something intoxicating and very right about his directorial sensitivity to the play of light and shadow, delicate editing tricks, and other beautiful visual devices (he even invented a technique for showing deafness—for example, the heroine's hearing aid falls off at the moment of struggle). And all this, quite obviously, is done solely for the sake of filming a stunning and completely unforgettable scene on the roof, when Carla, seeing Paul's lips splattered with foaming blood through her binoculars, is able to understand from his lips what she must do to save him from certain death.

In short, this pale blue film, with its stunning performances (actress Devo won the César Award for Best Actress, beating out the ugly Totu from Amélie and Yuppier from the pathetic The Piano Teacher that year), is special. I can't understand how I could have missed such a magnificent film.