In sort of preparation for the much-anticipated ‘Un Prophète’, I thought I should educate myself a bit in the cinema of Jacques Audiard. I remember the last film of his I watched was the high octane ‘De Battre Mon Coeur C’est Arreté’, most suitably in the little Pagode cinema on Rue de Babylone back in 2005. It made a lasting impression, both for introducing me to the inimitable Romain Duris and because of the way its director managed to blur the boundaries between separate moral universes, never once allowing the viewer to come up for air and take stock of what was going on. In Audiard’s films you are propelled along with the characters, living what they live, forced to make the same dubious moral decisions which are the only ones available to a humanity sorely lacking in omniscience.
I can’t quite put my finger on why, but the shades of Audiard’s universe remind me of a Patrick Modiano thriller, beefed up for the 21st century of course. Perhaps it is simply that I was reading ‘Rue des Boutiques Obscures’ contemporaneously to my first Audiard cinema experience back in 2005 or maybe it is more. Something of the crime fiction that becomes so real that its very reality is thrown into question. I cannot remember who the critic was that commented that in Modiano, his overabundance of detail lends itself to an ‘effet d’irréel’ – it was a comment that stayed with me and crops up here, once again. Audiard’s films are SO intensely gritty and real that by sheer power of detail and speed, they occasionally slip away from reality’s grasp. Both Audiard and Modiano focus on the grey in-between of this world. Which could be the worlds that other technicolour artists fail to explore: the dreary worlds of offices and prisons, average council flats and middle-age. However, whilst his may be a dirty urban star- its’ stone is cement- precisely therein lies its transcendence.
It can be no coincidence that the titles of his films – referring to a prophet, the heart and lips- point towards some inward spiritual truth. In Audiard’s early films it is the beat, the rhythm that drums out this other level. An ‘overabundance of detail’ that vacillates on the border of something else. In ‘Un Prophète’ this ‘something else’ is made explicit. I will return to it in more detail but here Audiard uses hallucinations, dreams, prophecy to lead us to the torn up insides of his world. Once again, however, blurring the distinctions by making the unreal so present that it moves and lives amongst the characters’ stone walls.
Carla’s (Emanuelle Devos) stone walls in ‘Sur mes Lèvres’ are the claustrophobic corridors of a construction firm and her disability: she is deaf. This was the role that won Devos a César in 2002 for Best Actress and she is truly brilliant as the deaf, plain, single secretary who, beneath appearances, harbours a passion and anger that makes her the perfect new star to be born into the criminal underbelly of Paris. The exposé, as it were, reveals Carla’s normal day to day life, as a secretary in a chauvinistic office where her work often goes unnoticed and she is teased and tormented by her co-workers to the point that she often switches off her hearing aid to retreat back into silence. Everything is about to change as she hires ex-criminal Paul (Vincent Cassel) who lies about his office skills in order to get a job. An unlikely friendship develops between the two, with Carla relishing the position of power she is momentarily accorded. However, this power play is overturned as Cassel mistakenly tries to repay her generosity by making an advance on her. ‘It’s what I thought you wanted’ – and the pity for the plain deaf woman again surfaces. The only element of Carla’s characterisation I would argue is a little forced in this film (and I pick the smallest hole at this precisely because Audiard is such a master of character development) is the all too facile sexual harassment that the men subject Carla to, for her plainness. Is there not something that is threatening about her disability, representing the unknown, which is the real reason for this bullying? Perhaps that is the point in the scene where Carla steals back her project to present to the bosses, tricking her male colleague… But I cannot help but feel that there is not a real understanding of motivation – perhaps this is the very question or threat of femininity that a male-orientated director is battling with (born into the film industry, following a successful paternal role-model). Women in his films are strangely absent: either not there at all (in ‘Un Prophète’ the action takes place in the most male-centric space of all, a prison) or debilitated (Miao Lin is blind in ‘De Battre Mon Coeur C’est Arreté’, Carla is deaf). This month’s Sight & Sound magazine posed some interesting questions around this thought to Audiard, worth a read.
As Carla and Paul’s friendship develops, she becomes increasingly attracted to Paul as well as his criminal accomplice. Paul realizes that Carla’s ability to read lips, from considerable distances, can be useful to his scheme. He is being pursued by a tough gang- to whom he owes a fair amount of money- and sees this as his chance to make his escape. Paul is an intriguing character, as Audiard invests him with a certain gentleness. His and Carla’s relationship is relatively equal until the action begins to speed up at the end. He is happy to be submissive to her and within her office sphere; it is Carla who calls the shots. But as the plot unravels, Paul decidedly takes control of the action and Carla is finally ‘feminized’ by her submission to him.
Cassel is such a brilliantly ‘instinctive’ actor, as he says of himself, that his testosterone-filled performance breathes complex life into the sleazy Paul who appears at once repulsive to us and sexually attractive. The whole basis for their relationship is this sleaze, as Carla rubs Paul’s bloodstained shirt on her naked body in the dark apartment, or secretly tries on her sexy shoes when there is no one there to watch.
By filming these ‘stolen’ moments from the characters’ lives, Audiard touches the vein of raw sexuality – and fantasy, intertwined. His camera focuses close-ups just off the centre of vision so that we feel we are experiencing Carla’s plight of half hearing the full story, half grasping the reality. However, this remarkable camerawork achieves a deeper understanding of those elements on the peripheries: the multiple details, the sounds of threat and danger, the peripheral characters, in short, a whole universe of the ‘too often ignored’ by the focal lens of other directors. As another mark of his cinematic world, the scenes are often cut short so that we race from scene to scene before one is fully played out, leaving it up to the viewer to keep up with the dizzying speed of his reality.
The intensity that builds is like the heavy breathing we can hear the whole time in Carla’s mind, the thumping of a heart in ‘De Battre’ or Malik’s whirling visions in ‘Un Prophète’. Is there such a place as a hyper-reality, a hyper-sexuality with such virility that we are almost taken somewhere beyond…
