The original French title of this film is SUR MES LÈVRES, lèvres being the French word for 'lips', and there are certainly plenty of lèvres in this film. The story concerns a girl who is deaf without her hearing aids, and even with them is still hard of hearing. Her ability to read lips is fundamental to the extraordinarily ingenious and complex thriller story which evolves in this film. The girl is played by Emmanuelle Devos, and I would say that her performance is so exceptional that it goes beyond brilliant and is one of the best screen performances of any French actress ever (ranking with Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, for instance). Rarely has any actress mastered such a vast range of subtle nuances in an extremely intimate performance. The perfect director for this particular film, who also jointly wrote the screenplay, was Jacques Audiard. There is probably no other director alive at the present time who is such a master of the incorporation into a film of extreme closeups, without their seeming in any way intrusive or overdone. In this film, we need them in order to see the lips and the eyes. In fact this film is so full of lips and eyes that sometimes they seem more important than the characters themselves. But that is because they really are. There are numerous very good films about deaf people, and also a very good American TV series SWITCHED AT BIRTH (2011-2017) about a deaf teenager, who is brilliantly played by Katie Leclerc, who really is partially deaf (in the series she plays one of the two girls who was switched at birth). Marlee Matlin is a famous example of a deaf actress who won a well-deserved Best Actress Oscar. And sometimes the abilities of deaf people to read lips has entered significantly into film plots. Deaf people actually make very good subject matter for the cinema in general, and such stories can be very emotional and meaningful, as can all serious films involving people who have any kind of physical handicap, since it shows us vividly what they are going through as they struggle to compensate for their handicaps. One of the finest examples of this type of film is NEVER FEAR, aka THE YOUNG LOVERS (1949), directed by Ida Lupino, which is a marvellous example of how to make a film about a physical handicap without being maudlin or condescending. The other thoroughly remarkable performance in this film is by Vincent Cassell, who plays an emotionally backward and rather oafish small time criminal who has just come out of prison. He applies to Devos's company for a job and she takes pity on him, because he too, like herself, is struggling against all the odds. He has almost no training or education and has never even made a photocopy or been in an office before, despite the fact that he is to become her office assistant. She covers for him and conceals from her colleagues that he spends every night sleeping in a sleeping bag in the company's lavatory. This strange pair slowly bond to one another in a most touching way, as two of life's outcasts who team up to try to overcome their respective debilitating handicaps together. Cassell beats up and threatens a dishonest colleague of Devos who has been preventing her from getting commissions on jobs, so that the man leaves the firm. But all of these developments are mere preliminaries to set the scene for what is to follow. The main plot of the film then involves a level of complexity and ingenuity which really is extraordinary. Just to give an example, Cassell discovers that a crime is afoot, and he persuades Devos to watch the plotters through a window, from a rooftop through binoculars, and over a series of evenings to write down what they are saying from reading their lips, in order to discover where and when the crime will be committed. The film is a very exciting and first-rate thriller with terrific character development and protagonists who are thoroughly three-dimensional. The film is truly superb and a real classic.
Review of Read My Lips
