It is a language of suggestion, of atmosphere, of small but telling details: the craggy, unreadable faces of many of the older white Afrikaners; the stern, almost imperial look of those three young white landowners on horseback; the languorous but defiant gaze of the young, black, female shop assistant, born into a system where oppression and humiliation was a given.
In the rarefied world of competitive bridge, where ferocious brains lurk behind mild eyes and unreadable faces, where blindlike screens divide the playing tables diagonally above and below to prevent partners from seeing, touching or illegally signaling one another, Americans and Italians have long dominated the Bermuda Bowl, named for the island where it was founded in 1950.
Bafflingly, the movie ends on a close-up of Frankie's unreadable face as he gets a terrible kicking from a former gang lieutenant and the voiceover intones Robert Frost's well-worn lines about "miles to go before I sleep".
No one ever says, "Americans, now that's one mysterious bunch!" So feel free to whisper to the person next to you with that blank, unreadable face of yours.
He's looking away from the masses with a dark but unreadable expression on his face: maybe it's exhaustion, or failure, or contempt.
Some are very old, especially Amédée, heartbreakingly played by 83-year-old Jacques Herlin, whose face is set in an unreadable expression, perhaps a gentle smile of acceptance and grandfatherly tolerance, or a rictus of suppressed pain.
He wears an unreadable expression.
Soon after, with no fuss, he appears: short, round, pink of face, unreadable.
A few sputtering moments later, he has trudged back to the rehab center, his head down and face unreadable.
His arrival in The Town (ITV1), sunglasses rammed firmly on nose, face unreadable, mouth resolutely shut, is rather more ambivalent.
We'd all been in the throes of it except Stella, the smallest and youngest of us, who watched quietly, her face unreadable.
