Read My Lips

Sur mes lèvres
a film by Jacques Audiard

Carla Behm is an overworked secretary in the busy office of a Paris-based property development company. Loyal and hardworking, she is unable to bear the limitations of her job and is hoping for a career promotion. Although confident of her own abilities, she is consistantly bullied and under-appreciated by her male colleagues. She is also deaf and can only hear people speak with the help of hearing aids. Partly due to the isolating nature of her disability, she has no social life beyond babysitting for her friend Annie who thrills Carla with tales of her sexual exploits. Carla has developed the ability to lip-read and much of her private life is filled with solitary time as she eavesdrops on conversations from a distance, while longing for a relationship with a man for herself.

When work at the office begins to overwhelm her, Carla's boss suggests she contacts a temp agency to supply an assistant. The agency sends Paul Angeli for Carla to interview and it becomes immediately clear that Paul has none of the required skills for office work as he is a recently released criminal currently on parole, but he is desperate for the job. Carla is immediately attracted by his scruffy and feral appearance, and hires him. She trains him in routine office duties and also covers for his lack of experience. One morning she arrives to find Paul has been sleeping each night in an office closet so she finds him a flat in an unfinished apartment block belonging to the company. When he tries to express his gratitude by making a clumsy pass at her Carla rebuffs him, preferring to introduce him at a party to show her friends how she too can have a boyfriend.

At the office, a senior salesman allows Carla to do all the work on a new contract and then manages to snatch it away from her just as she is ready to make the presentation and gain some credit to work up into a better position. Carla responds by blackmailing Paul into stealing the file and protecting her so she can close the contract herself. Paul is then tracked down by Marchand, a crime boss who demands under physical threat that Paul work for him in his nightclub to repay a loan, and when Paul is forced to agree he finds solidarity from Carla who falsifies the work records so that it will appear that he is working at the office. But then Paul discovers that Marchand is planning a bank robbery and he gets Carla involved by using her lip-reading skills to gain information and ultimately find a large cache of stolen money.

Carla's impaired hearing and the sense of her spatial and psychological isolation in a world without sound is portrayed with a subtle realism. The evolving relationship between Carla and Paul is the real subject of the film, as the labyrinthine plot develops into an engaging and suspenseful crime thriller. The story is an unstinting examination of a collaboration between two damaged people who manipulate and deceive each other, while skirting around their obvious and deep mutual attraction.

La vallée

The Valley (Obscured by Clouds)
a film by Barbet Schroeder

When Viviane, a chic diplomat's wife, meets an intriguing adventurer and his hippie friends in the wilds of Papua New Guinea different worlds collide. The group, led by enigmatic visionary Gaetan, convince Viviane to join their expedition in search of a mysterious uncharted valley which they believe to be Paradise. Their journey becomes a quest for origins.

Viviane is an uncomplicated young woman married to the French Consul in Melbourne. Her interest in native artefacts leads her to Papua New Guinea in search of the near-extinct Bird of Paradise feathers, which she plans to send back for sale in Paris boutiques. At the coastal town of Lae she meets Olivier, a young adventurer who is about to leave with some friends on an expedition into bush country. Gaetan, the head of the expedition, reveals his secret goal is to discover an unknown valley in the phantom regions of the island, which even on recent maps is just a blank spot annotated "Obscured by cloud". Only the natives suspect its existence but do not dare to explore it, for it is there that the gods live.

Despite her initial misgivings, Viviane joins the expedition to find her feathers. She wavers between doubt and fascination, hesitates about continuing and gradually discovers other visions of life outside her own. Her exposure to the lush environment, Papuan rites and instinctual love, pushes her further than her companions. As the search continues into the unexplored regions, the horses are abandoned and the expedition is stripped to the essentials. At the point of exhaustion, with return impossible, the mists clear and they see a valley, but not in this world.

Barbet Schroeder's striking second feature, a cult classic from 1972, famously features the wondrous soundtrack by Pink Floyd.

El secreto de sus ojos

The Secret in Their Eyes
a film by Juan José Campanella

When a retired criminal prosecutor decides to try writing a novel he finds himself inextricably drawn into the harrowing events of an unsolved crime from twenty-five years before. Benjamín Esposito has spent his entire working life as a criminal court employee. He can draw on his own past as a civil servant for a true, moving and tragic story in which he was once very directly involved. Re-investigating the brutal rape and murder of a beautiful woman, he discovers devastated lives, corrupt government officials and a lost love. But as he delves deeper he finds himself at the dark heart of society, where mysteries lurk in the shadows and danger waits around every corner.

In 1974, Esposito's court was assigned an investigation into the death of a beautiful young woman, Liliana Coloto, raped and murdered inside her house in a district of Buenos Aires. He meets Ricardo Morales, who had married the girl a short time before and worshipped her, body and soul. Moved by Ricardo's grief, Esposito vows to find the killer and bring him to justice despite having to contend with the apathy and ineptitude of the police and legal system. He knows that for help he can count on Pablo Sandoval, an underling at the office yet a close friend, who occasionally seeks release from the routine of his existence by drinking himself unconscious. He can also turn to the upper-class, Cornell-educated Irene Menéndez Hastings, his immediate superior and secretary of the court, with whom he is secretly deeply in love, although there is no hope that she will ever love him.

Argentina in the 1970s is a backdrop for the violence, hate, revenge and death that rule people's lives and fates, and Esposito's investigation takes him deep into a world of terrible violence. No longer an observer, he becomes an unwilling central character in a drama in which he is exposed to ever-greater danger. Although he is aware that historical accuracy is not paramount for his novel, the process of revisiting the case is more an issue of closure for him. As Esposito writes, he relives a past that rises up before his eyes and awakens all his demons. As he moves forward, he begins to see that it is now too late to stop. Telling a story from the past is no longer just a diversion to fill his empty hours. It becomes a narrow, winding path he must take if he is to understand and find justification for his own life, if he is to give any meaning to the years remaining to him, and if once and for all he is to confront the feelings he has for the woman who, twenty-five years on, he is still in love with.

Strewn with ingenious twists and turns, this award-winning crime thriller and love story is a stunning and suspenseful cinematic tour de force exploring themes of memory, corruption, punishment and justice, and how the past is always with us, ever-present in our lives.