Film Review: Between Two Worlds looks at a woman worn out by life - but refusing to be beaten down

Between Two Worlds is based on a true story, and adapted from Florence Aubenas’ essay ‘Le Quai de Ouistreham’

★★★☆☆

Between Two Worlds (12A) stars Juliette Binoche as Marianne Winckler, a recently divorced woman trying to get her life back on track and belatedly realised that there are ‘no real jobs left’.

Taking work as a cleaning lady, Marianne finds herself on the bottom rung of the employment ladder, barely making minimum wage and at the mercy of rapacious bosses who hire and fire at a moment’s notice. When Marianne takes a job as one of a crew who clean the Caen ferries, the work is ‘hellish’ — but gradually the standoffish Marianne makes friends with Marilou (Léa Carne), Justine (Emily Madeleine) and especially Chrystèle (Hélène Lambert), a struggling single mother-of-three who very slowly allows Marianne into her life.

How will Marianne survive the relentless grind? More importantly, how will Marianne’s new friends react if they discover she’s really an author, slumming it as a cleaner in order to write a new book?

Based on a true story, and adapted from Florence Aubenas’ essay ‘Le Quai de Ouistreham’, Emmanuel Carrère’s film is as well-meaning as Marianne’s reasons for going undercover as one of the French underclass: a noble but quixotic mission to expose the sordid world where employment law is a joke and job security a myth from some former Golden Age.

The performances are strong too, with Juliette Binoche subtly torn between her real and fake lives — the longer the pretence continues, the more Marianne comes to realise that her new friends have far more to offer than those from her middle-class world — although Hélène Lambert steals the show as the hardboiled Chrystèle, a woman worn out by life but who refuses to be beaten down.

That said, the numbers don’t stack up: if Emmanuel Carrère really wanted gritty realism, Marianne would be an author earning minimum wage not for the purpose of research, but in order to buy time to write.

(cinema release)