Stars: Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Devos, Olivier Gourmet, Olivier Perrier, Olivia Bonamy, Bernard Alane, Cecile Samie

Director: Jacques Audiard

Summary: Carla Behm, a woman in her mid thirties who has problems with her hearing, is used by a small time criminal to help him rob a nightclub owner... French dialogue.

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Workplace dramas seem to have become a French speciality, and Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips("Sur mes levres") proves a worthy follow-up to such notable predecessors in the genre as Human Resourcesand Time Out("L'Emploi du temps"). The film also nods towards Neil LaBute's In the Company of Menand 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 Lipsoffers pleasures that a glossier treatment would have missed entirely.

On the DVD:Read My Lipshas no extras on the disc beyond the trailer. But the transfer is clean and crisp, offering the full-width original ratio, and the Dolby sound captures the all-important subtleties of the soundtrack flawlessly. --Philip Kemp

Main Language:	French
Region:	Region 2
Subtitles:	English
Year:	2001
Release Date:	March 10, 2003
Runtime:	113 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	P 9058 D V D R
Keywords:	Subtitled, General, French, Read, My, Lips, Thriller, Aka, Sur, Mes, Levres
Genre:	Thriller