French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (son of the prolific scriptwriter Michel Audiard) sets himself the interesting task of how to make use of the faculty of lip-reading for the purposes of a thriller. The result is not all that interesting. The personalities and the relationship of an introverted secretary (Emmanuelle Devos, a far cry from the "dog" she's described as) and her scarred, tattooed, mustached and sideburned ex-con intern (Vincent Cassel) are interesting enough, not including, however, that old standby of "psychological" cinema, the heroine's examination of her naked body in a mirror. But the rooftop angle from which they spy on a circle of criminal confederates is well-nigh impossible for lip-reading, and in truth they get little more out of their surveillance than they would have gotten from plain old nonverbal voyeurism. Ultimately, at the climax, an actual use is found, but the semi-clever resolution is not (by half) clever enough to be believable. In spite of the small scale of the film, the dull, bluish image is pushed up to the plane of the screen as if by bulldozer, the narrowly focussed camera locked onto faces, the surrounding action practically unstaged. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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