Posted: 06/29/2002

Read My Lips [Sur Mes Levres]

(2001)

by Parama Chaudhury

Enjoyable French film is thriller, drama, and much more.

The Monty Python series has this great skit about a French film shot entirely at a garbage dump, with a man, a woman and a cabbage as the main characters. This is, of course, a spoof that hits the right spot, since it is so often that we see film critics and connoisseurs alike go goofy over a bunch of pretentious you-know-what. Recently, though, a series of French films—Le Placard and Amelie, among the notable ones—have been showing us that they can do that very rare thing too: make a good film with no pretensions. These are “ordinary” films, in the same way that Hitchcock’s films were ordinary: there is no obtuse concept underlying them. The bulk of the effort goes into the nitty-gritty of film-making and voila! We get a film that is enjoyable because it is a simple creation made with artistic sincerity. We’ve also gotten a couple of duds along the way—Brotherhood of the Wolves comes to mind—but for a student of cinema, or a budding filmmaker, or just anyone who likes movies, these films are a welcome change from the Bruce Willis-or-Ingmar Bergman choice that Hollywood and the Rest have schemed to offer us.

OK, I won’t ramble on. My point is simply that Sur Mes Levres is one more of those films. The story is straightforward: plain woman meets charming jailbird and together, they try to rob powerful bad guy. Plain woman, Carla, is of course, a secretary, a particularly onerous job in bureaucratic France. The twist in this tale is that she is deaf, so she can read lips. This skill is a channel to the office gossip—she “hears” the bosses make fun her in the cafeteria—and eventually, Carla’s weapon in the planned robbery. But along the way, we are treated to many delightful tidbits about Carla’s hearing problem: when the baby she is babysitting starts bawling, when the music in the nightclub is too loud, she slips off the hearing aid, and enjoys the privacy of her blissfully silent world. These intimate revelations make this central conceit a fact of life rather than a sleight of hand, so that we experience Carla’s life along with her, rather than watching her on a stage as she stumbles through her daily life.

Almost no-one is self-conscious. The exception is the cinematographer, Mathieu Vadepied, who tries to pull off a few too many “cute” shots, and chooses to make the camera movement a little too jerky. These self-indulgences add little to the movie. In fact the choice of shots—the rooftop next to the nightclub, the view from Carla’s desk to the boss’s office, the binocular-view of the bad guy’s office—are good enough to carry the film. The additional maneuvers only clutter up the canvas. Luckily for the film, editor Juliette Welfling cuts and pastes with glee, so that every time it seems like we are veering into silly sentimentality, we are quickly pushed ahead into a pleasantly mundane shot.

Director Jacques Audiard is probably best known for A Self-Made Hero starring the omnipresent Mathieu Kassovitz. In this movie, Audiard tries to combine genres, mixing a healthy dose of sitcom-like office comedy and unlikely love story with a half-serious stab at film noir. The acting ability of the cast is what makes these seemingly mismatched genres gel into a generally enjoyable movie. Emmanuelle Devos as the mousy Carla takes herself very seriously, yet somehow not quite all that seriously. You’re not sure whether taking off the hearing aids when the baby cries is funny or tragic, but each incident like this involves you in Carla’s dull existence a little more. Vincent Cassel, familiar to American audiences as one of the Russians who appear at Nicole Kidman’s doorstep in Birthday Girl, and as de Marangias, in the not-so-glorious Brotherhood of the Wolves, plays the ex-con, Paul. He is competent, and surprisingly complementary to Devos’s frumpy Carla, but wisely stays in the background to allow Devos the full space she deserves. Devos won the 2002 Cesar for Best Actress, and it’s clear that she was a good choice. The other actors put in a good ensemble performance, playing modest but important roles. One interesting subplot involves Masson, Paul’s parole officer, played by Olivier Perrier, who may have committed some kind of crime. It is clear that the movie could have been complete without this character or its story, but somehow, the possibility that this kind gentleman might have done something wrong, adds a very attractive edge to your basic action movie story line. At the end of the day, you probably won’t feel like you’ve just seen a classic. But at the same time, you won’t kick yourself for paying for a movie that presumes that your mental age is four. Sur Mes Levres is a deftly made Saturday night movie, to be watched with popcorn and pop in hand, not to be talked about for years afterwards, but to be accorded a brief tip of the hat.

Back to my rant: we want to see more ordinary French films over here, because we want to see such films done well. It’s fine if you want to be David Lynch and have a fixation with the color blue, but what about those of us who appreciate what Hitchcock did with The Birds or what Satyajit Ray did with Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen? Is it still possible to take a mediocre story and transform it into a classic movie? Before we diss American filmmakers, let’s see whether the French with their much-touted filmmaking tradition are up to the challenge. Any dude out of film school can make that Monty Python spoof about Brian and Briannette, or one of those God-awful shorts by the young Orson Welles, but making Le Placard or even Pretty Woman is much harder. More power to all those who try.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer, based in New York City.

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