(2001; Sur mes lèvres, French) Wearing hearing aids because she's nearly deaf, Carla Behm (Emmanuelle Devos), a hardworking secretary for Sedim, a construction company, reads the lips of her male co-workers while eating in the canteen, silently aware of their low opinion of her as a woman. (For having been completely deaf earlier in her life, as she says of herself, and only later becoming able to hear with her aids, she speaks too clearly to be convincing.)

While she babysits for her married girlfriend Annie, who's having affairs with men at clubs, Carla, suffering from poor self-esteem in her 20s, has had limited experience with dating men and has no boyfriend. When her boss allows her to hire a secretarial assistant; the employment office sends her ex-con (two years in Fleury prison for "aggravated robbery and receiving") Paul Angeli (Vincent Cassel), lacking any skills for the position.

Finding him sleeping in a closet near the offices, she gets him a studio on one of the firm's unfinished building sites; his way of expressing gratitude is to grab her and attempt to force her to have sex with him. However, in not reporting the incident but saying to Paul, "You do owe me," she asks him to steal a file for Les Flérets project from a colleague's car, resulting in Keller's resigning in embarrassment.

The project's reassigned to her; for three years as their secretary she'd lied to the wives of these avaricious men who'd shown her no appreciation, instead making snide remarks about her. Cautiously she brings Paul into her life outside of the workplace.

Weekly he meets with his parole officer Masson (Olivier Perrier); at work a visitor sent by Mr Marchand (Olivier Gourmet), the owner of a club to whom a three-year-old debt of 70,000 francs has been passed, takes him into the lavatory to bloody his nose. To Carla's great consternation, Paul, with whom she'd begun to feel comfortable, leaves to work for Marchand (though he can't tell his PO he's working at the club for a disreputable member of society) in an arrangement for paying off the obligation.

Meanwhile, Masson's wife Odile of 35 years has disappeared; Marchand's wife, driven home by Paul after making a scene at the club, is distraught over her husband's dalliances with bimbos.

Unexpectedly Paul invites Carla to the nightclub for what she assumes will be a date (she practices having a conversation she anticipates with Paul); instead, he takes her up to the roof, hands her a pair of binoculars, and asks her to read the lips of three men - Marchand and the two Carambo brothers - through a window in an apartment in another building down and across the way.

What follows in this flawed thriller from director Jacques Audiard (co-writer with Tonino Benacquista) of a resourceful woman with a hearing handicap among men lacking a sou to buy a clue at the mall is a violent escapade.

As compensation for Carla's watching from the roof for several nights, revealing Marchand and the brothers' plotting a caper, Paul agrees to return as her assistant, working both jobs; he provides some muscle to convince clients to cooperate with Carla and rescues her from an attempted rape.

As at Sedim, Carla succeeds where her male partner fails while experiencing another disappointment of being used for another's advantage.

Though she manages to follow some of the conversations among the unsuspecting men at a distance through the window (conveniently left open) near which they hold their colloquy, she has difficulty distinctly reading Paul's lips, initially not speaking slowly enough but repeating the message, when he intentionally attempts to communicate to her, cuffed to the plumbing in a bathroom, while awaiting the next round of tortures to extract the whereabouts of the missing loot.

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