Read My Lips

Though I wasn’t all that taken with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, it did lead me to Jacques Audiard’s earlier film, which makes fewer concessions to contemporary thriller conventions and hews closer to its Hitchcockian model -- less splatter, more nuance. Intense character study takes the foreground, while the caper remains distant and enigmatic, serving primarily to provoke character revelation. Emmanuelle Devos is a mouse-brown secretary for a major developer, integral to its operation, but blending into the background -- her desk is where everyone’s empty coffee cup winds up. She’s deaf without her two hearing aids, but uses that to her own advantage in tuning out the world. So does the film, with brilliant sound design, as well as stylish and intimate cinematography. When Devos looks sufficiently beset and bedraggled (no mean feat for such an alluring femme), her boss lets her hire an assistant to make copies and send faxes. She wants a man under her, for reasons that seem obvious but are highly complicated, and hires an ex-con scuzzball, Vincent Cassell, for the job. They attract and repel, but have what each other needs. The plot may have twists that don’t quite parse (who really cares about the maguffin?), but the psychology keeps getting deeper and deeper toward a most satisfying resolution. (2002, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-82.)