Product Description

Carla is beginning to chafe at the limitations of her career and is looking to move up. But as a 35-year-old woman with a hearing deficiency, she is not sure how. Into her life comes Paul Angeli, a new trainee. At 25, he is completely unskilled, but Carla covers for him when the need arises because of his other qualities - he's a thief fresh out of jail, very good-looking and maybe of some use to her. Starring Vincent Cassel (Birthday Girl, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Crimson Rivers).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47332 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-07-22
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 119 minutes

Amazon.com
Workplace dramas seem to have become a French specialty, and Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips ("Sur mes levres") proves a worthy follow-up to such notable predecessors in the genre as Human Resources and Time Out ("L'Emploi du temps"). The film also nods towards Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men and Hitchcock's Rear Window, but it's none the worse for that. Carla, our anti-heroine (Emmanuelle Devos), is an ugly duckling working as a secretary for a construction company in suburban Paris. Dowdy and all-but deaf, she's exploited and put upon by her male coworkers. When her boss lets her hire an assistant she bizarrely chooses Paul (Vincent Cassel), a scruffy and none-too-bright ex-con. But an odd symbiosis grows up between this pair of losers; the combination of his petty-criminal skills and her lip-reading abilities has certain potentials.

As A Self-Made Hero, his previous movie, showed, Audiard doesn't go in for lovable characters. Carla is no long-suffering saint and Paul is frankly sleazy, but this just makes their interaction all the more intriguing. Devos, glowering malevolently beneath her dark brows, and Cassel with his greasy hair and ratty moustache, turn in relishably truculent and un-starry performances, and Audiard deftly manages the transition from office comedy to gangland heist thriller with no grinding of gears. By the end the plot starts to strain belief, but it scarcely matters. The noir-ish lighting and potent use of hand-held close-ups enhance the film's sense of nervous unease, and there's ingenious use of sound to convey Carla's hearing-impaired world. Downbeat and unblinkingly amoral, Read My Lips offers pleasures that a glossier treatment would have missed entirely. --Philip Kemp

From The New Yorker
A half-deaf but observant secretary (Emmanuelle Devos), who reads people's lips and attitudes and feels like a loser, and a mangy ex-con (Vincent Cassel), with a blank look in his eyes and an endless capacity for trouble, make a very odd couple. But the writer-director Jacques Audiard, working close to his actors with a camera devoted to glances, reactions, and tiny gestures, gets us to believe that these two hard cases are destined for each other. The woman requires some waking up, a little danger or excitement, if she is not to expire from boredom and depression; the man needs some sense talked into him if he is not to be sent straight back to prison. They form an alliance and renew themselves by ripping off unsavory characters. The movie turns into a breathless and rather audacious study in the sexiness of a nonsexual relationship. In French. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

It's always the details, details, details
Carla (Emmanuel Devos) in Jacques Audiard's "Read My Lips" (Sur Mes Levres) is a social failure on several counts: she's practically deaf and wears two hearing apparatuses, she considers herself drab, with lifeless hair and spotty skin, she's overworked and under appreciated as an administrative assistant, she is taken advantage of by her prettier friends and employer, her fellow workers call her a "dog" and is used as a convenient, anytime baby sitter by one friend in particular. But Carla has one thing none of her friends and co-workers have: she's devilishly intelligent and merely waiting, lying in wait really, for an opportunity to implement her intelligence and unleash her wrath on a uncaring and unfeeling world. That opportunity comes in the guise of one Paul (Vincent Cassell) who applies for a job as Carla's assistant, having just been released from prison for theft and a multitude of other petty crimes. Paul, though applying for a job as an assistant to Carla has no experience on computers, taking dictation, using a copy machine or making coffee for that matter. But Carla, sensing a kinship and maybe something else, hires Paul on the spot...experience or not.
Carla likes ordering Paul around and uses Paul and his friend's "muscle" and strong-arm tactics to get things done at her place of employment... a Real Estate firm. Carla first utilizes Paul's larcenous skills by having him steal some papers from a co-worker and thus make him (the co-worker) look like a jerk to their boss and Carla a hero. Paul has ideas of his own also, and when he learns that Carla can read lips he asks for her help to bilk his night employer out of some major cash.
Carla is a great character: a seething mass of contradictions...straight-laced on the surface yet underneath a big mass of resentment and pent-up hate and hostility. Emmanuel Devos does a remarkable job with this role: she's appropriately sheepish and shy when appropriate but check out her eyes...there's a deep morass of something else, something larcenous, perhaps. Carla may be hard of hearing and a stooge for her friends and co-workers...but she ain't no dummy, that's for sure.
Vincent Cassell as Paul is on the one-hand scary as hell looking: greasy hair, tattooed arms yet there is a softness there and Cassell plays both sides of his character with aplomb: most of the time both in the same scene. The combination of his raw, brute-like force and street smarts and her intelligence and hostility makes for an unbeatable combination for a screen pair like we've never before seen.
Jacques Audiard has made a film about two down-and-out people who use crime as a way out of their predicament and, though it isn't at all easy... it works because, though Paul and Carla can grate on your nerves, they have a concrete plan that Carla makes sure is followed to a "T."
Ultimately, it is all about Charm....isn't it? And Audiard has made sure that Paul and Carla come off as the heroes of his film....downtrodden, desperate even, but sweet, charming and remarkably organized and intelligent. Like I've always said: It's always about the details, details, details.

Smell my shirt
For those of you who have seen this rather extraordinary romantic thriller noir, my review title is self-explanatory: this is cinema verité for the 21st century. For those of you who haven't, let me note that this begins slowly, so stay with it. You won't regret it.

What French director Jacques Audiard has done is create a taunt noir thriller with a romantic subplot intricately woven into the fabric of the main plot, told in the realistic and nonglamorous manner usually seen in films that win international awards. In fact, Sur mes lèvre did indeed win a Cesar (for Emmanuelle Devos) and some other awards. For Audiard character development and delineation are more important than action, yet the action is extremely tense. The romance is of the counter-cultural sort seen in films like, say, Kalifornia (1993) or Natural Born Killer (1994) or the Aussie Kiss or Kill (1997), a genre I call "grunge love on the lam" except that the principles here are not on the road (yet) and still have most of their moral compasses intact.

Vincent Cessel and Emmanuelle Devos play the nonglamorous leads, Paul and Carla. Carla is a mousy corporate secretary--actually she's supposed to be mousy, but in fact is intriguing and charismatic and more than a wee bit sexy. But she is inexperienced with men, doesn't dance, is something of a workaholic who lives out a fantasy life home alone with herself. She is partially deaf and adept at reading lips, a talent that figures prominently in the story. She is a little put on by the world and likes to remove her hearing aid or turn it off. When she collapses from overwork her boss suggests she hire an assistant. She hires Paul, who is just out of prison, even though he has no clerical experience. He is filled with the sort of bad boy sex appeal that may recall Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's Breathless (1959) or even Richard Gere in the American remake from 1983. We get the sense that Carla doesn't realize that she hired him because she found him attractive. When Carla gets squeezed out of credit for a company deal, she gets Paul to help her turn the tables. From there it is but a step to a larger crime. Note that Carla is unconsciously getting Paul to "prove" his love for her (and his virility) by doing what she wants, working for her, appearing in front of her girl friends as her beau, etc.

The camera work features tense, off-center closeups so that we see a lot of the action not in the center of our field of vision but to the periphery as in things partially hidden or overheard or seen out of the corner of our eyes. Audiard wants to avoid any sense of a set or a stage. The camera is not at the center of the action, but is a spy that catches just enough of what is going on for us to follow. Additionally, the film is sharply cut so that many scenes are truncated or even omitted and it is left for us to surmise what has happened. This has the effect of heightening the viewer's involvement, although one has to pay attention. Enhancing the staccato frenzy is a sparse use of dialogue. This works especially well for those who do not speak French since the distraction of having to follow the subtitles is kept to a minimum.

Powering the film is a script that reveals and explores the unconscious psychological mechanisms of the main characters while dramatizing both their growing attraction to each other and their shared criminal enterprise. But more than that is the on-screen chemistry starkly and subtly developed by both Devos and Cessel. It is pleasing to note that the usual thriller plot contrivances are kept to a minimum here, and the surprises really are surprises.

See this for Emmanuelle Devos whose skill and offbeat charisma more than make up for a lack of glamor, and for Vincent Cessel for a testosterone-filled performance so intense one can almost smell the leather jacket.

Partners in Love and Crime: Romantic in its Original Way
"Read My Lips" stars Vincent Cassel ("Crimson Rivers") and Emmanulle Devos, directed by Jacques Audiard, whose father Michael was also in the film business, a famous writer for many Fench noir films. And this film is also a great noir, based on one simple idea which Audiard uses quite brilliantly.

The film is seen from the viewpoint of Carla (Devos), who works at a small office as secretary. Carla, who is now mid-thirty and needs a hearing aid, is always ignored at her office, and is made to work hard before the copy-machine. And her life is utterly lonely.

So, when the boss told Carla to hire an assistant, she wants someone whom she can definitely "amiable." And preferably, male. Enters a guy named Paul (Cassel), who is, as he reveals soon, on parole, and may still have some connection with the underworld. Does she hire him? Why not, and he is very handsome.

The relations between Carla and Paul lead on to the series of unexpected events, including a love story and big money. Carla is clearly in love with Paul, but at the same time she kind of exploits him as his possible "love" and employer; Paul also uses her special gift of "reading lips" in the situation like "Rear Window," in which he might get even with the gangster who had once humiliated him.

"Read My Lips" belongs to the genre of noir, some people say rightly, but the film works better as a romance between two losers in society. It's not an usual love or romance. It's a kind of romance in which one finds a consolation in the other, but the act starts to violate the codes of ethics as it goes on and on. There are crimes depicted here, but the most profoundly moving one is about the very dangerous relationship between Carla and Paul, or especially anything about Carla, who manipulates and is manipulated.

Great acting from Emmanuelle Devos who must be both "ugly" and "seductive" at the same time. She simply rivets your eyes on the screen whenever she appears. No wonder she beat Audrey Tautou at Cesar Awards, winning the best actress. Even Vincent Cassel pales before him, and that's really something.

The only complaint is its unnecessary sub-plot about the parole officer, which looks as if mercilessly cut to make room for the two leads. I thought, OK, but why not cut it all?

That aside, "Read My Lips" is a strong film about the power-game between the man and woman. Rarely was the relation between man and woman depicted so convincingly. And love, very fragile kind of love.