Read My Lips (2002) Synopsis:
Young secretary Carla is a long-time employee of a property development company. Loyal and hardworking, first to arrive and last to leave, Carla is beginning to chafe at the limitations of her career and is looking to move up. But as a 35-five-year-old woman with a hearing deficiency, she is not sure how to climb out of her humdrum life, though she is confident in her own abilities. Into her life comes Paul Angeli, a new trainee she decides to hire. Paul is 25 years old and completely unskilled, but Carla covers for him when the need arises because of his other qualities - he's a thief, fresh out of jail and very good-looking. It's a case of good meeting bad.
Read My Lips (2002) Movie Review:
Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) is a a frustrated secretary in her thirties working for a real estate development company who teams up with ex-con Paul (Vincent Cassel) to rip off a mobster named Marchand (Olivier Gourmet) in the thriller Read My Lips.
Life is depressing for Carla. She doesn’t dress trendy, has to use two hearing aids because she is almost deaf and has no boyfriend. At her work she is taken for granted and laughed at. Her married girlfriend uses her pad to have an affair. So when her boss tells her she can hire an assistant when she was expecting a promotion, Carla starts taking charge of her life.
The way she describes the kind of assistant she wants to the human resources person sound more like she trying to hire a boyfriend rather than a helper.
She ends up choosing Paul who is completely unqualified for the job, is on parole and because she can control him or so she thinks.
It doesn’t take long for Carla to help Paul in different ways like finding him a place to stay and covering up for him when his parole officer checks if he is at work when he is not.
But there is a price she extracts for her kindness. Carla gets Paul against his wishes to steal a file from her co-worker so she can move up in her company.
Soon after Paul is forced to take a second job as a bar tender working nights at a club owned by Marchand to pay off an old debt.
Keeping his eyes open, Paul finds out that Marchand has stashed lots of cash from a recent heist. To find out where it is he recruits Carla to read the lips of Marchand and his associates using binoculars from a roof top of a building across Marchand’s club.
As Carla and Paul try to outsmart and manipulate each other they realize they need one another. It’s the combination of Carla’s brain and Paul’s brawn that makes a nice fit.
There is also a slow romance blossoming between the two as their lives are put in danger and under stress. In fact, Carla starts to dress more sexy and asserts herself with added confidence as things progress.
Reap My Lips works it way very slowly to some wonderful suspense and intrigue. Director Jacques Audiard knows how to create uneasy and anxiety filled situations spiced a bit with some sexual tension.
The problem with this film is that it takes its fine time to get to the juicy parts and in between you just have to struggle to pay attention to what’s going on.
While creating some interesting moments of foreboding by putting two characters from different walks of life together is strange situations, Read My Lips still needs to speed things up and put more exciting seasoning throughout to really pack them in.
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Read My Lips (2002) review written by: Gil Benzeevi
7th September, 2008 
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