Read My Lips (Jacques Audiard, 2001)

Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos in Read My Lips

Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Vincent Cassel, Olivier Gourmet, Olivier Perrier, Olivia Bonamy, Bernard Alane, Céline Samie, Pierre Diot, François Loriquet, Serge Onteniente, David Saracino, Christophe Vandevelde. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista. Cinematography: Mathieu Vadepied. Production design: Michel Barthélémy. Film editing: Juliette Welfling. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

It's so easy to imagine an American remake of Jacques Audard's Read My Lips that it's surprising it hasn't been done with, say, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in the roles played by Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel. At its core it's a romantic thriller about a mousy office worker who blossoms when she teams up with a scruffy ex-con for a heist that depends in large part on her ability to read lips. But this is the French version, so it's also violent and murky, with some complicated backstories and sidebar episodes. Devos plays Carla, an overworked secretary/office manager with a hearing impairment, who collapses one day after being harassed once too often by other members of the staff. Her boss takes notice, however, and lets her hire an assistant to do some of the grunt work like photocopying. The hire is Paul (Cassel), who has just got out of prison, and Carla is so grateful for what he does -- and so obviously turned on by his rough masculinity -- that she goes out of her way to help him find a place to live and even gives him money. Paul repays her by helping her get even with one of the office harassers, but he still owes money to Marchand (OIivier Gourmet), one of his old criminal associates. That's where Carla's ability to lip-read comes in. So Carla and Paul team up to rob a large amount of money that Marchand is holding for some fellow criminals. Read My Lips was well received, winning César awards for Devos and for the screenplay, and nominations for Cassel, Audiard's direction, and for best film. But it also has some detractors, who criticize it as overlong and needlessly complicated, including a subplot involving Paul's parole office (Olivier Perrier) that seems to have nothing to do with the main plot. The treatment of Carla's hearing impairment is vague, and some have questioned whether even the most skilled lip-readers could do what the film has her do. But Devos and Cassel are terrific, generating real sexual tension, and Audiard skillfully provides suspense and surprises. 

The Reckoning (Paul McGuigan, 2002)

Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany in The Reckoning

Cast: Paul Bettany, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Gina McKee, Simon McBurney, Tom Hardy, Stuart Wells, Vincent Cassel, Ewen Bremner, Matthew Macfadyen, Hamish McColl, Simon Pegg, Marián Aguilera, Trevor Steedman, Elvira Minguez. Screenplay: Mark Mills, based on a novel by Barry Unsworth. Cinematography: Peter Sova. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: Andrew Hulme. Music: Adrian Lee, Mark Mancina.

Nobody, I think, sets out to make a mediocre movie; they just happen to turn out that way. Certainly, the makers of The Reckoning must have had hopes of excellence when they hired such fine actors as Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Vincent Cassel, Matthew Macfadyen, and a 20-something up-and-comer named Tom Hardy. The story they wanted to film came from Morality Play, Barry Unsworth's novel, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, about the theater in medieval England as it edged away from dramatized Bible stories into secular material, mixed with a murder mystery solved by a renegade priest. Unfortunately, The Reckoning is something of a mess, starting with the priest, Nicholas (Paul Bettany), cutting off his hair and escaping through the woods after being discovered in flagrante with a married woman, whose husband he killed in the ensuing melee. On the road, he encounters a troupe of traveling players headed by Martin (Dafoe) and persuades them that he would be an asset to their company. They go to a village by the castle of Lord De Guise (Cassel) where the trial of a woman accused of killing a teenage boy has just concluded with her conviction and sentence to be hanged. One thing leads to another as Nicholas becomes involved with proving the woman's innocence and exposing De Guise as a murderous pedophile, dragging not only the acting troupe but also the villagers into his exposé. The narrative is muddled by too many unnecessary flashbacks into Nicholas's past, by the intervention of a character known only as "the King's Justice" (Macfadyen), and by a half-hearted attempt to strike up a romance between Nicholas and the woman accompanying the acting troupe, Martin's sister, Sarah (Gina McKee). The brightest moment in the movie comes when the players perform their version of the story of Adam and Eve, with Hardy's Straw, the actor tasked with playing women, as Eve in a sort of bare-breasted body suit and a ropy blond wig. He looks a little like Botticelli's Venus in the get-up. If The Reckoning had more moments like that, and less of the mystery-solving plot, it might have been a better movie, but as it is, the mise-en-scène is cluttered and gloomy and the action unconvincing.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Benjamin Millepied and Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Screenplay: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Clint Mansell.

Overheated melodrama with horror movie elements that seems determined to make ballet into more of a psychological and physical trial by torture than is entirely plausible. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as the tormented dancer, and she gets good support from Mila Kunis as her potential rival and Barbara Hershey as her mother. But I found myself laughing at its excesses when I think director Darren Aronofsky, over the top as usual, meant for me to shudder at them.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method

Carl Jung: Michael Fassbender
Sigmund Freud: Viggo Mortensen
Sabina Spielrein: Keira Knightley
Otto Gross: Vincent Cassel
Emma Jung: Sarah Gadon

Director: David Cronenberg
Screenplay: Christopher Hampton
Adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton based on a book by John Kerr
Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
Production design: James McAteer
Music: Howard Shore

Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, as Viggo Mortensen, playing the man himself, demonstrates, a cigar is a prop that can help you win an acting contest. Because too often a costume drama based on a play becomes just that: a contest among actors to show who can come out on top, especially when the cast consists of actors like Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Vincent Cassel -- none of them exactly shy of showing what they can do before a camera. When I heard of it, I thought Mortensen was a decidedly off-beat choice to play the father of psychoanalysis, and he was in fact the second actor to be cast in the role, after Christoph Waltz, an almost inevitable choice, found he had a scheduling conflict. Mortensen had worked with director David Cronenberg twice before, but playing men of violent action in Eastern Promises (2007) and A History of Violence (2005), not a pre-World War I middle-European Jewish intellectual. And yet Mortensen gives a delicious performance as Freud: puckish, proud, intellectually combative. And the cigar helps, whether brandished elegantly or plugged defiantly in the middle of his face. By contrast, everyone else seems a little over the top. Fassbender (who was second choice after Christian Bale) is his usual handsome presence, but he frets a little too visibly and never quite establishes Jung as the challenger to Freud's authority that Freud seems to have thought him to be. Keira Knightley acts the electrons off the screen as Sabina, almost popping out an eye and dislocating her jaw in her mad scenes, but recovers nicely in her later moments in the film. And Vincent Cassel, as the mad Otto Gross, takes his role to the extreme as the man who carries Freud's theories about repression to their logical extreme: Don't repress anything. Ever. The film's battle of ideas gets a little bit lost in all the emoting, and as so often happens in filmed costume dramas, the scenery and the sets capture the eye when the words should be capturing the mind. But Howard Shore's evocation of the melancholy side of Wagner's music is perfect for the era in which the film is set, the transition from 19th-century Weltschmerz into 20th-century bloodshed, a time when, as Joyce punned, we were Jung and easily Freudened. Jung's prophetic dream of a bloody tide sweeping over Europe is cited in the film, as a warning that all of this intellectual (and sexual) ferment was about to be inundated by war.  

Watched on Starz Encore

La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)

Would the friendship of the Jew, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), the African, Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and the Arab, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) be possible in the Parisian banlieus today? For that matter, was it in fact possible when writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz made La Haine in 1995? Or was it a symbolic construct to emphasize solidarity against the Establishment and the corrupt police force, somewhat like the ethnic stews of Italian-, Irish-, and Jewish-Americans (but never, sadly, African-Americans) that Hollywood filmmakers put on bomber crews and destroyers during World War II as a way of promoting solidarity against the enemy powers? The question is rhetorical, of course, and not designed to undermine the importance and brilliance of Kassovitz's terrific (and terrifying) film, made in response to outbreaks of violent protest in the poorer suburbs of Paris. It has the quality of some of the best neo-realist Italian films of the postwar years, with the additional sense of something about to erupt that pervades the film and has not dissipated in the 21 years since it was made. If anything, it has spread into the rest of the world, especially in the post-9/11 era. The trio of actors on whom the film mainly focuses is extraordinary, both individually and as an ensemble.

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)

The Russian mafia seems to have supplanted the Italian kind in the popular imagining of the violent criminal world. It has long been a staple of TV crime shows like Law & Order, but David Cronenberg gave it the most impressive and terrifying embodiment yet in Eastern Promises. The film, set in London, is a strikingly globalized production, with a Canadian director and English screenwriter (Steven Knight) and actors who are Danish-American (Viggo Mortensen), British (Naomi Watts), German (Armin Mueller-Stahl), French (Vincent Cassel), Polish (Jerzy Skolimowski), and Irish (Sinéad Cusack). Yet the film somehow maintains a strong semblance of authenticity, thanks to strong performances. Mortensen, long a favorite of mine, gives an intensely compelling, and Oscar-nominated, portrayal of a Russian undercover agent infiltrating the mob. His celebrated battle in the steam bath, in which he, naked and unarmed, is attacked by two well-clothed thugs carrying linoleum knives should never let you take another two-against-one battle in a James Bond film seriously. (Or not until Daniel Craig does it in the nude.) Mueller-Stahl demonstrates once again that one can smile and smile and be a villain, and Cassel steals scenes with his portrayal of Mueller-Stahl's careless, dissipated weakling of a son. My only complaint about Eastern Promises is a rather saccharine ending to Watts's portion of the story. The story of Mortensen's character ends inconclusively, with his apparent ascension to the role of boss of the mob, a risky position for an undercover agent. A sequel has been proposed and postponed, and at last report seems to be dead.