It’s a cruel irony that Carla (Emmanuelle Devos), the deaf secretary in the new French thriller
Read My Lips/Sur mes levres (d. Jacques Audiard), struggles to answer the busy phones, but it’s not likely that anyone at her office would notice, or care. Carla is virtually invisible to her coworkers, one of them even habitually discards his half-empty coffee cups on her desk, without a thought, even when she is sitting right there. It is not clear whether he isolation is self-imposed or foisted upon her (perhaps both, at one point, she even brushes off a deaf activist who attempts to communicate with her in sign language), as she sits alone at the office canteen and barely interacts with the people around her. Her workload has literally pushed her to the point of collapse, and when the head of the construction firm where she works suggests hiring an assistant, she initially assumes that she is going to be fired. It’s amusing to watch her at the employment office, as she tries to find a secretarial assistant. She treats it like a dating service, to the bemusement and annoyance of the clerk, asking for a man in his 20s “whose not too tall...and has nice hands.” That she would act this way is not surprising. Her friends seem to take her for granted, using her as a baby-sitter (one advantage of her deafness, is her ability to turn off her hearing aids, blocking out the cries of the baby) or using her apartment for an illicit tryst; she seems like a wallflower, she has no lovers, and doesn’t seem to get out much (she confesses she doesn’t like to dance, etc., etc.) She probably got more than she bargained for when Paul (Vincent Cassel), a twenty something, rough looking, ex-con who shows up to take the job as her assistant.
Carla and Paul are both underestimated by society. At the beginning of the film, she is a rather mousy secretary, given to wearing neutral colors and a bulky, shapeless winter coat. She walks around with downcast eyes, and the way she wears her hair often obscures her face. Though mostly silent, her eyes and the pained/exasperated expression on her face betray her anger, resentment, and an almost Machiavellian intelligence that really begins to develop along with her relationship to Paul. The tight framing (including irises) and the manipulation of the soundtrack to simulate her deafness (whether the sound is absent, tinny, muffled, or normal), point to her subjective, inward looking way of life, as do the quiet moments in her bedroom, as she gazes at her naked body in the mirror. Paul too is rather inward looking, he kind of shuffles around aimlessly, keeping mostly to himself; given his rough appearance and manner, people have a tendency to underestimate his intelligence (his parole officer, Masson, doubts that Paul is able to do office work, and instead recommended janitorial duties), and he’s fine with that, often exploiting other’s perceptions of himself for his own gain. This kind of inward looking relationship can probably be extended to what I thought was the unnecessary subplot involving Masson and the disappearance of his wife. Our first glimpse of Masson (outside of his interactions with Paul), a seemingly gentle and kindly middle-aged man, is of him in his underwear, reclining on his sofa, totally absorbed in the classical music CD that he is listening to with headphones. It’s as if he too has tuned out the entire world around him (and given his apparent delusional nature, this is not surprising).
Carla and Paul are drawn to each other, forming a strange partnership, partially fueled by somewhat repressed desire, as well as their willingness to use each other to further their own ends. They kind of circle each other warily, not sure of each other’s expectations. Carla clearly wants some kind of excitement, danger, and power (her need to control things drives many actions of the plot), though, rather realistically, she approaches this with trepidation. She gives Paul a job that he is unqualified for, some clothes, and an apartment to live in, but she rebuffs his sexual advances (he figures that is what she wants) and runs out. However, she later takes him to a friend’s birthday party, where she shows him off to her friends and then draws him close, but not too close. Eventually, they both learn of each other’s special talents, her lip reading, and his criminal skills. She uses his skills to sabotage the career of a rival coworker, by stealing an important file from his car and then “saving” the day for the company. After Paul is forced to work for a nightclub owner named Marchand, whom he owes money, Paul deduces that something shady is going on, given the presence of some career criminals. He employs Carla to spy on them, reading their lips through binoculars from the rooftop of an adjacent building. In return, Carla forces Paul to return to work at the office.
What is most interesting at this point of the movie, is not the criminal thriller aspects of the plot, but the transformation of Carla. At work she becomes more assertive, willing to speak up at meetings and offering suggestions on how to fix “problems,” from a “psychological” approach (she has Paul and a cohort beat a man who is interfering with a building project, while coolly communicating to them on a cellphone). She walks more upright, and even stops her friend from walking all over her; she even adopts a more stylish look. I never really felt that Devos was conventionally attractive, but I found her unbelievably sexy after her transformation. As Kent Williams, a local film critic put it in his review, “But power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and Carla, like Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in
Batman Returns, draws strength and sexiness from the darkside.” As she is drawn further and further into the criminal dealings of Paul, she becomes more assertive and probably gets more danger than she was ever bargaining for: almost getting raped in a parking lot by some men she meets in the bar (she is saved because she made Paul jealous, one of the few times that his affections for her are visible; she was flirting with her would-be rapists in the bar, and Paul went looking for her after she left her table; Carla is more open with her desire, at least to herself, though she too resists displaying it to anyone. She is coy to her friend about her relationship with Paul, she cavorts in his stuff when he isn’t around, she takes his shirt home with her as a memento, she practices her pickup lines before meeting Paul at the nightclub, etc., etc.), she burglarizes and steals tens of thousands of francs of heist money (two garbage bags full), and helps rescue Paul from torture and murder by setting up Marchand to take the fall.
Because of their strange relationship, you never quite know whether the film will end in betrayal or if they will get together, but when it is all over, they collapse in each other’s arms. Money in hand, they prepare to go on the run, passing by a scene of Masson being arrested by the police for the disappearance/murder of his wife. Masson is totally lost in his own world, with a befuddled expression on his face, he repeats that he loved his wife, over and over again. The film ends with Carla and Paul making love for the first time; in a reprise from earlier in the film, we get a shot of Paul driving a car, his hands are on the gear shift; Carla’s leg grazes his hand and he runs it up and under her skirt, unlike before, there is no hesitancy or pulling back. They may still be outcasts, but at least they’ve finally found and accepted one another.
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