Thrillers attract audiences and sell well. Producers love them and many script writers and directors aspire to make good thrillers. Some succeed, others less so. Jacques Audiard, the director and co-writer of the 2001 film ‘Sur mes lèvres‘ (the English title is ‘Read My Lips‘) seems to have aimed to do more than just a good thriller. This film, the third feature in a career that would go on to have several notable successes, begins as a comedic office drama and evolves as a noir thriller, but from the opening sequences it’s clear that the director is more interested in his two main characters. We are dealing with a romantic story with a strong and well-repressed erotic charge at the same time. The physical consummation of the bond between the film’s heroes is always postponed, and it’s good that it is so. The justification of what would have been a trivial and almost obligatory scene if the film had been written differently, becomes the essence of the whole story.
Carla is a clerk in a construction company. She’s in her mid-30s, but she dresses and looks like she’s at least ten years older. She is withdrawn and shy, but this shyness has its source in a handicap that she hides – she is almost deaf. When the boss offers to hire her an aid, the one who shows up to be hired is Paul, a man a few years younger than her, just paroled out from prison. The two seem like the most unlikely couple possible, but they share their loneliness and disadvantaged positions in the world around them. After a completely wrong start, the bond between them is built through solidarity. Paul tames himself and learns to express his feelings in ways other than violence, while Carla discovers her own beauty and will turn her disability into an advantage. The complications seem to go on in an endless chain. The transformation of the romantic melodrama into a heist thriller might seem implausible if it were not validated by the evolution of the bond between the two heroes.
The lead roles are played by two of my favorite French actors, then on the rise. Emmanuelle Devos builds her character by initially enveloping her in the shell of an old lady in the making, only to gradually shed her complexes and become a woman in love and capable of much to be with her unlikely match. Vincent Cassel once again plays a bad boy role, as he had done several times at that point in his career. He will too get rid of his shell of asociality and engage in the bond that recovers him morally (but not legally). The sincerity of the interpretations conquers. The two make up a ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ type pair that succeeds to make the audience care about them. ‘Sur mes lèvres’ ultimately becomes a romantic story disguised as a crime thriller.