The impish, mischievous air of Juliette Binoche is one of the qualities which mark her as one of the most vivid and interesting actresses working today. The star has mastered the art of deploying a sort of disarming silliness whenever things get too serious, with flashes of humor that only make whatever character she is playing seem that much more alive and real. This talent was recently put to most satisfying use in Claire Denis’ “Let The Sunshine In,” where she allowed audiences to both feel for her desperate character and laugh at her sometimes slightly delusional ideas. This quality was also central to Safy Nebbou’s “Who You Think I Am,” although in a more subdued and naturalistic form — but that film also flipped this joie de vivre on its head to show its damaging and dangerous potential. Emmanuel Carrère’s “Between Two Worlds,” premiering at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, takes it further still.
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In Nebbou’s film, Binoche’s heedless enthusiasm leads her anti-heroine to catfish a young man on the internet; the woman so enjoys the romance that she essentially brushes aside the fakeness of the relationship and the pain she is causing an unsuspecting stranger. In Carrère’s film, this denial takes on a more active and political dimension. Binoche plays Marianne, a writer who, tired of always hearing about the state of poverty in which a large part of the French population lives and unable to really see or imagine it from the safe confines of her upper-class bubble, decides to move to another town and take a job as a cleaner. Once again, as in “Who You Think I Am,” Binoche plays a woman whose intentions seem pure: in voiceover, Marianne says she wants to write a book that would definitively reveal the reality of these disadvantaged lives, and help other privileged people like her to better understand how the other half lives. The fact that this would require her to lie, and to fool all the genuinely struggling people she meets, does bother her a little. But it does not horrify her.
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She manages to explain away her cluelessness about how to fill unemployment forms with a made-up story about how she spent all her adult life working as her husband’s secretary, until he divorced her for a younger woman. But her easy-going attitude and excessive politeness still mark her out as a tourist — she is a little too happy to be here. Binoche being Binoche, the actress beautifully explores all the ambiguous nuances of this cheerfulness: one moment, Marianne appears mildly amused by what, to her, is an exotic world; the next, her joy seems to derive from the sincere affection she has developed for the poor souls who have become her colleagues.
Carrère himself is a writer and often appears within his nonfiction works, treading the same thin line between touristic exploitation and sincere experience. It is therefore apt that he chose to make his return to directing, some sixteen years after “La Moustache,” with an adaptation of the non-fiction book, “Le Quai de Ouistreham,” by French journalist Florence Aubenas, who really did go undercover working as a cleaner. Carrère’s most recent book, entitled “Yoga,” related his grappling with the central challenge of both yoga and meditation, which touches on how to reconcile our insides with the outside, on how to be both of the world and in the world — on how to be both observer and actor. That he would prove so dexterous here in dealing with the moral complexity of this scenario, therefore, isn’t surprising, and his unobtrusive style allows for both the kind and the cruel truths of this reality to co-exist in a state of constant, uncomfortable tension.
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Most refreshing, especially at a festival that always features borderline voyeuristic arthouse films about people bravely fighting to make ends meet, is the kind of attention Carrère pays to working-class characters and their jobs. For Marianne, changing all the sheets and towels in a ferry boat bedroom in under four minutes is the most strenuous and painful work she has ever done. For her colleagues, it is the lot of their daily lives, and Carrère emphasizes how boring, tedious, and repetitive those tasks are, instead of imbuing them with the kind of epic or tragic dimension they lost long ago in the eyes of these people.
He is also careful to highlight another facet often missing from films about the working class: all of the workers here, and in particular, the feisty Christèle (Hélène Lambert), are well aware that some others don’t work as hard as they do and still have more money to spend. Although Christèle’s life is not a scene of constant misery, it is difficult, tiring, stressful, and uncertain. None of this is groundbreaking information, yet Marianne appears seduced by the very kind of romantic perception about the “simple” life that the film avoids. In one moment during the film, at the end of a long shift, she asks Christèle to stop by the sea and runs to swim in the water while her colleague, bemused, stays on the shore. Later on, when the two of them stay stuck on the ferry as it makes its way back to Dover, she turns the incident into an all-night drinking celebration.
The fact that her immersion into this other world appears to have little effect on her perception of it also shows in a much more disturbing way during an incident where she sees Christèle holding her wallet and immediately suspects her of stealing. The reaction surprises even Marianne herself, but crucially, not enough to make her stop her charade. Something must break, and once it does, Carrère does not spend more time on Marianne’s guilt than she rightfully deserves.
The presence of non-professional actors in the roles of Marianne’s colleagues further helps avoid tiresome arthouse clichés about how the underprivileged supposedly live, and Binoche’s naturalistic performance marries itself beautifully to the ensemble while grounding, in reality, a character unbelievable, yet true. [B+]