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Read My Lips starts out like a French version of Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men. Its main character is Carla (Emmanuelle Devos), a partially deaf secretary for a property development company who is both mocked and exploited by her co-workers. Carla has trained many of her current bosses and continually finds herself working her tail off on various projects, only to be removed just before they're completed. Her personal life isn't much better, as her friends don't think twice about dropping their kids off at Carla's apartment so they can party it up. Basically, she's a 35-year-old doormat, and everyone is wearing big muddy boots.
The mousy Carla, whose life seems to be firmly rooted in daily routine, finds things at work turned a bit upside-down when she is told she can hire an assistant for herself. She asks the employment agency for a "well-groomed man" with nice hands and gets someone with bad prison tattoos who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead. His name is Paul (Vincent Cassel, Birthday Girl) and he's just done a stretch for aggravated robbery, but after an awkward interview, Carla hires him anyway (Her: "Have you worked with spreadsheets?" Him: "Spreadsheets? Oh, yeah. Mostly German ones.")
Sparks don't exactly fly between the two officemates, which makes us even more suspicious when Carla bends over backwards to make Paul's life a whole lot better. When she discovers the office has been doubling as his living space, Carla hooks Paul up with a spacious apartment owned by the company, and even gives him an advance on his salary. Is he taking advantage of her lack of personal contact with other humans, or is she just eager to keep him employed so she can have someone to boss around?
The answer is "neither," as it turns out. Lips shifts from a gawky office romance into a pot-boiling thriller in its second half. After he is badly beaten by a mobster (to whom he owes 70,000 francs) and forced to tend bar at his popular nightclub, Paul cooks up an idea to abscond with a large sum of the man's money. His plan involves having Carla perch on a roof with a pair of binoculars and read the lips of the people in the mobster's apartment. Meanwhile, Carla takes advantage of Paul's street smarts in ways that positively affect her career. It's reciprocal exploitation by a pair of society's rejects.
Logistically, Lips is a nightmare, beginning with the whole lip-reading thing (why does everyone in that apartment stand by the window when they talk?). The lack of chemistry between the two leads undermines the film's few romantic moments, and a subplot involving Paul's parole officer is less than half-cooked. But most glaring of all is the transition between Lips' two very different halves. It almost seems like writer-director Jacques Audiard (he wrote Venus Beauty Institute) simply threw a switch and hoped for the best.
Luckily, Devos's performance is strong enough to make the aforementioned criticisms seem far less important. She won the César, France's version of the Oscars (beating Under the Sand's Charlotte Rampling, The Piano Teacher's Isabelle Huppert and the heavily favored Audrey Tautou from Amèlie), and rightfully so, as Devos wears Carla like a second skin. Lips also deservingly won a César for its sound, which is presented from Carla's perspective. We experience sound the way she does, so when her hearing aid is removed, we hear fumbling before everything becomes muted and muffled.
Never once predictable, Lips seems like the kind of project some Hollywood star will remake in the near future, though it's unlikely they would allow themselves to appear as damaged as either of these two characters (a la Tom Cruise and Vanilla Sky, right down to the big rooftop ending).
1:56 - Not Rated
========== X-RAMR-ID: 32983 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 787860 X-RT-TitleID: 1113145 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 6/10
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