Review: "Read My Lips"

I’ve been, for a long time, a fan of the French actor Vincent Cassel.  I first saw him in the shocking French film Irréversible and have admired most of his subsequent performances.  I often thought he deserved better roles in Hollywood (he was the moronic son of the chief gangster in Eastern Promises, for instance) and with his role in the much-hyped Black Swan perhaps that’s going to happen.


Recently, Cassel starred in two highly-acclaimed movies about the notorious criminal Jacques Mesrine.  I downloaded them both but they didn’t do much for me - they seemed to just depict Mesrine’s famous exploits rather than say anything about them.  But in a review of those films I read a description of another film (Sur mes lèvres (English title: Read My Lips)) which I later saw and I think has become my favourite love story of all time.




Carla, the heroine (played by the French actress Emmanuelle Devos) of Read My Lips is a plain woman who does administrative work in an office.  She was once completely deaf but her hearing apparently improved and now she can hear with the assistance of hearing aids.  She is treated poorly at work (her coworkers leave half-empty cups on her desk) and she resents slights real and imagined, but remains silent.  She is smart but completely impotent.  And she is desperately lonely.


One day she faints at work and her boss offers to hire her a temp.  She tells the human resources department that she wants a man between 25 and 30 with nice hands.  They tell her that they cannot distinguish based on gender, but it’s a man they send her.


Paul (played by Vincent Cassel) is not so much stupid as a man utterly lacking in judgment.  He has a moustache and tattoos snaking up his arm.  He cannot type or use office software.  It becomes clear he has recently been released from prison.  She hires him.  Of course she hires him.


I hope you see this movie and so I won’t spoil what happens next.  Suffice to say that the relationship between Carla and Paul could generously be described as difficult.  He does not find her particularly attractive but makes bumbling passes at her out of a sense of duty or sheer boredom.  She shrinks away repeatedly but is also obsessed with him.  They seem almost too incompetent at romance to be able to act on their mutual desire.


But the thing is that life is not easy for either of these characters.  Without Paul, Carla is destined to sit at the desk and throw out her colleagues’ beverages for them.  Without Carla, Paul is going back to jail.  And what’s fascinating is how their inevitable mutual attraction grows as they eventually realize how well they work together.  Carla is shrewd (and, of course, she can read lips) but lacks the virility to follow through on her impulses.  Paul is powerful and competent but has no sense of any overarching purpose to his life.  But together - well, anything is possible.  And that’s where the love comes from.


I think one of the most frustrating things about Hollywood romances is how instant the attraction always is.  People’s eyes meet across the room and then boom!  That’s it.  The plot is rarely about why they fall in love but rather the endless idiotic misunderstandings seeking to keep the couple part.  The great thing about Read My Lips is that it takes two characters who dislike each other and then literally forces them together, not because of unlikely plot contrivances, but because of feelings so deep that they are barely aware of how they work.  Love is not seen as something that comes from nowhere and makes the characters permanently happy.  It springs from a deep compatibility that is not just lying around on the surface, but is in fact a profound usefulness, a shared passion, an ability to navigate the pitfalls of life together better than alone.


There have been some interesting statistics released recently about how people are getting married less often these days.  The reason for it seems simple enough to me - people used to get married because they had complementary skills.  Women were forbidden from work and developed a set of skills to complement those of men.  Now women are just as good at earning money as men (and in many cases, just as bad at cooking) and there’s nothing left, so it seems, to encourage them to pair up, except the superficial attraction that Hollywood understands so well, and the tiresome routine of playing The Game which is what passes for romance in the city.


In the end, then, the reason why Read My Lips is such a great story, is that it understands what love is really about much better than most movies, or even most of us period.  And it holds out the possibility that even in our modern world, outside of traditional gender roles, it's possible to build a relationship on a real, mutually advantageous partnership, rather than a fleeting attraction or a bunch of big talk and simple tricks.