Read My Lips (15) <br></br> The Majestic (PG)

Revenge is sweet

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The workplace has become a source of unlikely fascination in recent French cinema. Certain films, such as Laurent Cantet's brilliant Time Out, make chilling comment on work as a necessary delusion, a way of filling up the months and years and calling it "life". Others, like Philippe le Guay's Nightshift and last week's featherweight comedy The Closet, see the workplace as a Darwinist dogfight, with its bullies and its victims, its strivers and its stragglers. Jacques Audiard's extraordinary new film Read My Lips (Sur mes levres) seems to fit this pattern, at least for a while, though its most poignant insights have nothing at all to do with work.

The film pivots on an outstanding performance by Emmanuelle Devos. She plays Carla Bhem, a secretary in a property development company where she does most of the work while her male superiors blithely discard their coffee cups on her desk. Thirtyish, single and unfancied, Carla is further isolated from the world by being chronically deaf – she wears hearing aids discreetly beneath her shoulder-length hair. When her friend complains that she hasn't had sex "for months" we can see instantly that Carla feels envious that the privation can be so easily estimated.

So we can't be sure of her motives in choosing to hire Paul (Vincent Cassel) as the office gofer: does she enjoy the idea of bossing a male minion, or is she actually attracted to him? She's taking a risk either way. Paul is just out of jail, with a string of robberies behind him and a parole officer to keep sweet. Cassel, stubbled, pale, with a foxy watchfulness, really does carry the tang of the criminal class here, and his attempt to give Carla a quick one in return for her kindness rings true: no quid in this life without a pro quo. As it transpires, Carla is after something, but it's not rough sex – she's going to put his light fingers to work stealing an office file and thus outmanoeuvre the chauvinist berk who's been keeping her down these years.

The plot's fuse is lit on his discovery of her secret talent. Carla can lip-read, and once Paul is back ensnared in his familiar underworld he enlists her in an outrageous scheme to rip off his boss. The balance of power begins to see-saw between them as each exploits the other's craftiness. She may have the upper hand at the office, but in the nightclub where he bartends he calls the shots. Even when he saves her from being raped, he's not so compassionate as to let her skip that night's spying duties. In truth, I didn't quite buy this noirish turn to events, ingenious though it is. That Carla is an expert lip-reader, fine; but that she must do so via binoculars from a distant rooftop down to an apartment window is pushing it. As she herself says, "I can read lips, not scalps".

What keeps the film psychologically credible, and makes it, in the end, very moving, is Emmanuelle Devos's bashful charisma. The way Carla's hand will suddenly reach to adjust her hearing aid is a reminder of how lonely deafness has made her, and yet her lip-reading can pick up some co-worker's sotto voce sneer at her plainness: a horrible mismatch of distance and intimacy. She isn't "plain" at all, incidentally; the combination of strong nose and questioning eyes are what would be called jolie-laide in her own country and a "certain-angle stunner" over here. Her best scene, which Audiard encouraged her to improvise, involves Carla alone at home rehearsing her declaration of love to Paul. The gawkiness of this in an adolescent would be entirely natural – in a grown woman it stabs at the heart. The idea of "discovering one's sexuality" sounds like so much soft-core (or just old hat) but Read My Lips breathes new life into the phrase. It won't be forgotten in a long while.

By coincidence, Jacques Audiard's previous film, A Self-Made Hero, has points of resemblance with The Majestic, a florid romantic drama about a man who is mistaken for a war hero. First, the bad news. It's directed by Frank Darabont, who, having triumphed with The Shawshank Redemption, overdrew massively on that goodwill by making The Green Mile, a stupefyingly mawkish tale of a death row saint which seemed to last about 10 hours. The so-so news is that it stars Jim Carrey in a straight role – maybe too straight. He plays a middling screen writer named Peter Appleton who runs foul of anticommunist hysteria in 1950s Hollywood, has a freak car accident and fetches up in a small town, Lawson, with his mind a blank.

The good news is that there's the germ of an interesting film here, one that plays a variation on the double-identity theme of Preston Sturges's Hail The Conquering Hero and The Return of Martin Guerre. The townsfolk, you see, make themselves believe that this amnesiac stranger is Luke Trimble, miraculously returned from the war to reclaim his sweetheart, Adele (Laurie Holden) and to assuage the loss of other soldier sons. Oh, and of course to help his dad (Martin Landau) restore the town's cinema, The Majestic, to its previous glory. The drama resides in the gap between these good folks' esteem of Luke and our knowledge of Pete as a hack writer who wanted to save his skin: between the fictions we create and the reality we know. Or rather, that's where it ought to reside.

Unfortunately, Darabont and writer Michael Sloane don't know when to stop with the golden syrup. Their picture of apple-pie America makes Norman Rockwell look like a neo-realist. Indeed, its paean to small-town decency and togetherness is so neurotically earnest it prompts you to wonder if such an era existed at all. Carrey is fine as the Jimmy Stewart figure, foregoing his usual rubbery contortions in favour of everyman integrity, though he can't do much to save the last half-hour's tearful excesses. That's Darabont's other problem: not just a sentimentalist but a long-winded sentimentalist. Almost every scene runs for about twice as long as it needs to, hoping to bring a lump to the throat but merely causing a slump in the shoulders. Inside The Majestic there's a good 90-minute picture signalling to get out. As it is, this slow two-and-a-half-hour sobfest is a penance nobody should have to sit through.