I have always found Juliette Binoche to be an actress who exhibits wide emotional range, quiet beauty, and arresting intelligence. While “Between Two Worlds” doesn’t make use of all her many gifts as an actress, as films like Kieslowski’s “Three Colors: Blue,” Haneke’s “Code Unknown,” and Assayas’s “Clouds of Sils Maria” do, she provides a solid, controlled performance in this less imaginative and layered film.
The film is loosely based on French journalist Florence Aubenas’s best selling 2010 book “Le Quai de Ouistreham” (published in English as “The Night Cleaner“). Following the model of American writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed,” Aubernas started working with a pseudonym undercover in the gig economy at oppressive jobs and living in a student flat in Caen, a city in Normandy.
French writer Emmanuel Carrère—well known in France for his non-fiction—directs the film. And his strength lies in depicting the daily drudgery of working as a cleaner, and in avoiding false notes when capturing Binoche’s (Marianne Winckler) interactions with her fellow workers. The most distinctive of them performed by a striking non-actor, Hélène Lambert (Christèle), who plays a vibrant, economically struggling mother in her 30s with three children, who establishes a genuine friendship with Marianne. There is also a more submerged younger woman, Marilou (Léa Carne), with dreams of escaping the milieu, who becomes part of their friendship circle.
However, Marianne is playing a role, creating a fake biography so she can write a book that “makes the invisible visible.” It is a tricky situation making believe that she is not middle class and that her life is not dependent on the work. In addition, she knows the friendships she makes will end once she finishes her book and her real identity is revealed. Marianne doesn’t handle her new identity seamlessly, feeling guilty about what she is doing by using Christèle as a subject and lying to her and the others. In fact, she is often on the verge of disclosing that she is a writer.
But the film is not primarily about exploring Marianne’s psyche and how she may feel inauthentic with the workers she is writing about. It is more about the nature of the grinding work, the minimum wages, and the many shifts on the cross-Channel ferry. Arriving at dawn, making 60 beds an hour, and scrubbing toilets is onerous. Whatever camaraderie exists, these workers’ lives remain hard. Though, the film does not offer an explicit critique of the system that sustains this kind of exploitative labor.
The film’s conclusion is problematic. One doesn’t expect some neat reconciliation between Marianne and the two workers she is closest to. But the ending is too abrupt, needing greater emotional complexity and a deeper sense of what Marianne feels about the whole intricate dynamic of writing this book. Still, it’s a film worth seeing.
