Jacques Audiard is a fascinating case study in the limits of the auteur theory. The hybridity and variety of his films seem to willfully challenge the concept of an auteur with a clearly unified vision. Throughout his career, Audiard has tackled a wide array of subjects and genres, including the thriller, the western, the romance, and the musical. He has also made movies in an impressive number of languages: in addition to French, his films have featured dialogue in Vietnamese, Arabic, Tamil, Russian, Corsican, Mandarin, English, and Spanish. These qualities—along with the fact that he claims influences from a multitude of cultures—have established him as an exemplar of *cinéma-monde,*a brand of contemporary filmmaking that is not confined by national boundaries. And yet, despite an eclecticism that makes him hard to categorize, the word auteur is still a meaningful and appropriate designation for Audiard, one that reflects the singular and demanding nature of his work, as well as his stylistic and thematic hallmarks.

Over the decades, Audiard has repeatedly returned to the terrain of the crime film, foregrounding dysfunctional men and unreliable father figures. His affinity for the genre has led to him being commonly referred to as “the French Scorsese.” Audiard’s first two films as a director are prime examples of this masculine mode. See How They Fall(1994), a strange road-movie thriller, presents parallel narratives of two pairs of men, both symbolic father-son dyads characterized by violence and inadequacy, as well as by predatory behavior on the part of the elders. A Self-Made Hero (1996) embeds its male protagonist’s search for identity within the legacy of the Nazi occupation of France. The young hero (Mathieu Kassovitz) invents for himself a totally fictitious past as a member of the French Resistance; his own lack of achievement (as well as his father’s) mirrors what historians have identified as the trauma dealt to the national male psyche by the humiliating defeat of the French army in 1940. In both of these films, women are marginalized.

Audiard’s third feature, Read My Lips (2001), stands out among his early works as a story built around a complex female character who takes initiative in a male-dominated world. I remember watching the film when it first came out and feeling excited by Audiard’s departure from the gendered conventions of the crime movie. Read My Lipssignals its focus in the opening scene, with a series of tight shots of the body of the female protagonist, Carla (the brilliant Emmanuelle Devos, who won a César Award for her performance). All at once, we discover her working environment—a bland modern office—and her disability, which has given rise to a special skill: because she is hard of hearing, she has learned to read people’s lips from far distances. Carla’s condition, which requires her to use a hearing aid at work, functions as a potent metaphor for her loneliness. Her emotional isolation is confirmed in scenes that show her being humiliated by her colleagues, who mock her not for her disability (of which they are apparently unaware) but for her supposedly ungainly physique, a judgment that reveals more about the absurd beauty standards placed on women than it does about her appearance.