Read My Lips
by Jacques Audiard
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Emmanuelle Devos, Olivia Bonamy, Olivier Gourmet, Olivier Perrier, Vincent CasselDirector: Jacques Audiard
Writer: Jacques Audiard
Producer: Alix Raynaud
Producer: Bernard Marescot
Producer: Jean Louis Nieuwbourg
Producer: Jean-Louis Livi
Producer: Philippe Carcassonne
Writer: Tonino Benacquista
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-07-22
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures
Movie Reviews of Read My Lips
Movie Review: It's always the details, details, details
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Read My Lips
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).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
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