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.
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