Possible spoilers...

In the evening, Constance reads the novel "the reader". She likes this novel so much that she ends up identifying with the heroine of the novel, Marie. Her job is to read several pages of any book to her customers including a disabled teenager called Eric, a stressed businessman or a little girl whose name is Coralie...

Michel Deville, the director transmits us the joy and the comfort her main character brings to her customers reading pages of Baudelaire, Carroll or Marguerite Duras. Marie thanks to her nice voice, her passion of reading, her shiny presence make people happy and eventually makes the spectator happy. In a way, like "the hairdresser's wife" (1990), a beautiful movie by Patrice Leconte, "la lectrice" is one of these rare films where you smile during almost all the projection. It is the opportunity for Miou Miou to find one of her very best roles too and she offers us a delightful composition. She's the real major asset of the film.

"La Lectrice" is a smart, poetic movie with sparkling dialogs and ingenious sequences where the pleasure of words joins the pleasure of pictures. Another good point: a rightly chosen classical music mainly used in the moments where you see Marie walking down the streets of Arles between two reading sessions. The music gives the movie an impression of lightness and well-being. Besides, I feel that everything here breathes joy of living and even if the end of the movie remains a little dark (Marie by refusing to read an extract from a Sade novel is becoming jobless), we can detect a message of hope in Constance's intention of becoming a reader: reading must be conserved in a society where books occupy a less and less important place.

Michel Deville's movie won the Louis Delluc price in 1988. It was only fair.

There's more than a little touch of Pirandello in the night about this entry in which a young woman, Constance, is not only reading a book entitled The Reader, to her husband in bed but also projects herself on to the eponymous character, Marie, and acts out either her own (Constance) fantasies or those of the fictional Marie or a combination of both. Given the task of carrying the film Miou-Miou is more than up to it and freshness is added by both the location, Arles, albeit little more than the picturesque narrow streets traversed by Marie between gigs, and the supporting cast, relatively unknown outside France though certainly well respected - especially Brigitte Catillon and Patrick Chesnais - within it. It's unquestionably a film that will divide opinion between those who will surrender to its whimsy, offbeat charm and dialogue and those who will denounce it as soft-porn with a press agent. As for me, I love Brigitte Catillon in anything.

One evening in bed a young woman (Miou-Miou) begins to read a book called "La Lectrice" to her husband. It tells the story of Marie (Miou-Miou again), who decides to place an advert in her local newspaper offering her services as a reader. This results in her being hired by a wide range of the town's inhabitants, often with unexpected results. A teenage boy in a wheelchair (Regis Royer) asks her to read Maupassant and Baudelaire; the Hungarian widow of a general (Maria Cazares) selects her favourite passages from the works of Marx and Lenin; a businessman (Patrick Chesnais) with no time to read seems to be more interested in Marie than in the book she is reading; a young girl (Charlotte Farran) whose mother is too busy to read to her requests Alice In Wonderland. The town's authorities are constantly suspicious of Marie's new profession and the strange effect it seems to be having on some of her clients.

The complex structure of the film is a delight, constantly switching between scenes involving Marie and her clients and those from the books she is reading. Strong sensual overtones emerge as some of the clients confuse the services Marie is offering with those they imagine she is offering.

Miou-Miou is excellent in the role of Marie, the southern town of Arles in winter looks magnificent, and the whole thing is driven along by the music of Beethoven. The overall effect is to heighten the viewer's interest in books and reading and make them want to seek out some of the books included in the film. Highly recommended for bibliophiles everywhere.