Reviews
Total Film - ...Tautly written and stylishly composed, READ MY LIPS is part Hitchcock homage, part absorbing character study..., Box Office - ...[Devos] gives a remarkable performance....Audiard successfully maintains suspense on different levels throughout a film that is both gripping and compelling..., Los Angeles Times - ...The performances of the two leads are impeccable....[Cassel] has reined in his natural magnetism to excellent effect, but it is Devos whose performance absolutely has us in its power..., Rolling Stone - ...Jacques Andiard's film is a spellbinder..., Hollywood Reporter - ...Audiard manages to suggest intimacy with revealing gestures and body language....The acting is faultless..., Sight and Sound - ...It demonstrates how discreet but ambitious aesthetic daring and an eye for nuance and detail can produce intelligent, absorbing and resonant European genre cinema..., New York Times - ...Mr. Audiard's direction is fluid and quick...
Additional Information
In its opening shot, READ MY LIPS shows Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) inserting her hearing aids and getting ready for work. But it's evident that her hearing problem does not hold her back as she throws herself into answering the constantly ringing phones at her job as an unappreciated secretary for an architecture firm. Swamped with work, Carla asks her boss to hire an assistant for her, Paul (Vincent Cassel), an ex-con who is trying to get his life back on track. To everyone else--her sexist coworkers and her sexy friend Annie--Carla is a dog with a disability. But to Paul, who is Carla's subordinate, she's a femme fatale. In Paul's life--to his parole officer and the two-bit thugs to whom he still owes money--he is an untrustworthy outcast and a bum. But to Carla, he is a secret weapon with skills (lock-picking, physical intimidation) that she needs. Likewise, Carla becomes Paul's secret weapon as her ability to read lips opens up a new world of possibilities to his plotting, criminal ways.
READ MY LIPS is a story of romance through and through, and, in its second half, a fast-moving and constantly flip-flopping heist drama. Once Carla and Paul really start working together, the tension between them only helps them along. Never trusting each other, never predictable in their actions, these characters imbue Jacques Audiard's masterful film with a breathtaking suspense that is simultaneously alluring and repellent.
