Read My Lips

Don't be scared: it's only a bit of darkness and fun

The common French word for "thriller" is polar, which actually comes from policier – cop story – but which fortuitously evokes the distinctly chilly edge of the best French crime movies. One of the iciest polars of recent years was Jacques Audiard's debut film Regarde les hommes tomber, a story so unsettling – about a veteran hitman and his too-eager young accomplice – that several other French films have fallen on their faces in recent years vainly hoping to recapture some of its grim magic. Director-writer Audiard moved onto different, slightly less nightmarish territory with his follow-up A Self-made Hero, about a Resistance hero who turned out to be a mythomaniac sham – a film which understandably caused ripples in France, with its suggestion that Audiard's character perhaps wasn't a unique case.

Audiard's third film, Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres), is in some ways the closest he has yet come to a straight commercial thriller, but it is done with a dark mischief that puts it in another class entirely. This makes it the sort of hybrid French feature that tends not to fare well on British screens; what comes across to audiences in France as a perfectly accessible but classy mainstream venture tends to look, once it crosses the Channel, like a dyed-in-the-wool art film. It's hard to know whether to blame the marketing or just our over-cautious xenophobia. Yes, Read My Lips is moody, sombre and unsettling, but it's very entertaining too, and it takes a director-writer as clever as Audiard (co-scripting here with Tonino Benacquista) to mix darkness and fun so smartly.

Audiard's heroine is Carla (Emmanuelle Devos), a plain, put-upon secretary in a development company, whose isolation and nervousness are exacerbated by her deafness. Lip-reading in the office canteen, she knows what kind of mean-spirited wisecracks her creepy male colleagues are bandying behind her back (echoes of Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men). But Carla is tougher and hungrier than we think. One day, advertising for an assistant, preferably male and well-groomed, she lands up with Paul (Vincent Cassel), a mumbling, scruffy ex-con who can't quite look her in the eye, and who secretly moves into the office stationery cupboard for want of anywhere better to stay. He quickly lunges at Carla, but she knows who's boss and swiftly figures out a way to use his criminal skills to improve her position. Pretty soon, she and Paul each have something on the other, and are both enjoying the kick of having an equivocal, not yet self-evidently sexual, secret relationship.

The film's first half is brilliant and unusual, something like a cross between Brian de Palma (lots of mutually suspicious glances) and Mike Leigh, in the observation of devious and slimy office mores. We know as soon as we see them that these two misfits are made for each other, even if they have to effectively blackmail each other into togetherness. The casting is dead-on, using that excess ordinariness that French stars carry off so well. Emmanuelle Devos absolutely eats up her screen space with a furious gaze, playing it drab and recalcitrant at first then shading subtly into outright feral. Her heavy, anxious physiognomy goes well with this picture of a woman always on the lookout for a likely advantage. We believe in her as someone who's been leading a sheltered, defeated life, but Carla really comes into her own in the film's second half, when the thrill of subterfuge gets her juices flowing.

If he weren't such a dazzling actor, co-star Vincent Cassel (whom British viewers know best as the skinhead in La haine and the yuppie from L'Appartement) would be in danger of being French cinema's omnipresent freak show. In his decade-long career, he's had more ludicrous hairstyles than Sean Penn, but his latest transforms him beyond recognition. His Paul comes as a whole package of tics and furniture – nervous mumble, centipede moustache, greasy cowlick and one of those patterned shirts only ever worn by the seediest variety of French screen gangster. Cassel brings out the victim element in the supposedly glamorous figure whose criminal mystique hooks Carla – hard man that he supposedly is, he spends much of the film getting beaten up until Carla comes along to rescue him. As a picture of a man who inhabits the narrowest, drabbest, most suburban circle of the underworld, it's a brilliant performance, Cassel giving Paul a vulnerable awkwardness that recalls Depardieu at his early best.

The film's second half strays into slightly more conventional caper territory, involving a plot to rob a crooked nightclub owner. The hood is played by the blandly baby-faced Olivier Gourmet, who was the waffle-stand owner in the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta, and who is currently French-speaking cinema's top man for spineless scuzziness. When things threaten to get suspenseful in the most routine manner, Audiard gives us a skin-of-the-teeth escape routine – using lip-reading, of course – that dazzles with its sheer cheek. And there's a very dark subplot threaded through, involving Paul's parole officer, that doesn't quite convince, but stops things getting too cosy in a romantic-comedy way.

This is the sort of thriller that just doesn't get made in Britain or America – neurotic, ambivalent, and not afraid to dirty its hands with moral uncertainties or even visual drabness. The early-morning Paris suburbs have never looked so grey, or French office politics so vengefully protocol-bound. All the better to offset the lead couple's nervously erotic rapport. Add a subtly-textured sound design, and echoes of Bernard Herrmann in Alexandre Desplat's tense score, and "polar" is the word.

j.romney@independent.co.uk