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Carla is a long-time employee of a property
development company. But as a 35-five-year-old woman with a hearing
deficiency, she struggles with the stigma of her colleagues who lack any of
appreciation of her, although she is confident in herself. After realizing she
needs help at work with the suffocating workload she hires an assistant. Paul
is a 25 year old ex-con who has no skills at work and poor people skills also.
He does have something that appeals to Carla however, his looks.
Being desperate for affection, Carla takes
Paul under her wing, to guide him, and teach him. But having little in the way
of friends, Carla is easily swayed. Paul is after all man fresh out of jail,
and despite trying to mend his ways and stay away from the life that put him
into jail in the first place, he will find himself without a choice. Carla
however can see some useful points to Paul’s past life of crime, and will
slowly but surely become entangled in a life she knows nothing about.
Read My Lips is an exciting story of
loneliness, desperation and crime. Set in France (the movie is also all in
French with English subtitles) we are presented with the two worlds Carla
finds herself living in. The stable, reassuring, and dead boring world she
finds herself in as a secretary, and the life of crime, which clearly weighs
down Paul’s soul, but to Carla, is exciting and new.
The acting throughout the movie is superb; you
really feel what each character is going through. You are also torn between
wanting to have the characters live happily in the mundane world that is being
a secretary (and secretary’s assistant) , and living large, in the exciting,
lucrative, yet dangerous world of crime.
Seriously, I can imagine everyone enjoying
this movie, whether or not you normally like movies with subtitles, I honestly
believe you’ll thoroughly enjoy this.
Read My Lips is shown in 16x9 (1.78), with
quite an impressive picture. There is some edge enhancement, but it doesn’t
distract. There are no artifacts (or at least none that I noticed), and the
color reproduction is superb. There is a decent amount of grain, but I believe
that was intentional to help with the mood of the movie, so I won’t put that
down as a negative.
The 5.1 channel sound on this disk is almost a
waste, the only time I found either the subwoofer or surrounds to be in use is
when in a nightclub, but at the same time, if you didn’t have them at that
point, you’d be missing out. With the main character being hearing impaired,
you may think sound wouldn’t play a large part in the movie, but not so, in
fact it’s the opposite. The use of sound throughout is an integral part of the
experience, and luckily it’s nice and clear (as far as I can tell being all in
French)
I would
have given the extras section a high rating, if it were not for the fact that
all the commentaries, interviews and deleted scenes were only available in
French WITHOUT subtitles. A real shame there, it would have been nice to have
been able to enjoy this part of the disk as much as the movie. Pity, unless
you speak French that is.
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7 Deleted scenes (3 with
director’s commentary) unfortunately they are all in French, including the
commentary without any subtitles.
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A photo gallery with 8 pictures from the
making of the movie
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2 Interviews, the first with Tonio
Benacquista, and the second with Andre Desplant (both in French without
subtitles)
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The international trailer
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2 Commentaries, one by the director (Jacques
Audiard) and the other by Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel (who play
Carla and Paul respectively) Both without subtitles.
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Cast and crew filmographies
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