![]() ![]() Filmmakers have been embedding themselves in “invisible” communities for years now - “Nomadland” director Chloé Zhao has been a pioneer of this approach - and “Between Two Worlds” feels behind the curve. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor. The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. Marianne means well when she adjusts her book idea to focus on this one woman (an invention for the film, since Aubenas published the “group portrait” that Marianne abandons), but there’s a kind of exploitation involved in the way she mines Christèle’s misery for material. If you’re going to make those people visible, why not tell a good story in the process?įor Binoche and Carrère, the good story centers on Marianne’s connection to a woman named Christèle (Hélène Lambert), a single mom with three kids, no car and very real risk of being evicted. Someone has to clean toilets, they figure. Americans tend not to share the same interest in social justice stories, embracing more of an “every man for himself” attitude. If the movie, which kicked off the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes, ever finds its way to the U.S., it will find a very different reception there. But cleaning people are not invisible to everyone, and it speaks to her privilege (and perhaps that of the movie’s target audience) that she thinks so. But being unemployed - or barely/badly employed - is her job, as is convincing the women kind enough to show her the ropes that they’re all in the same boat.Įarly on, she gets busted by one of the counselors at the local employment agency, which gives Marianne a chance to justify herself: She wants to make these invisible workers visible to the public, she says. Obviously, a version of this book could have been written by being transparent - a fly on the wall, rather than one in the ointment - so why insist on all the subterfuge? It’s a question that an actor would understandably find fascinating, and that takes on a metatextual dimension as Carrère surrounds Binoche with nonprofessional performers: Binoche is playing a journalist (renamed Marianne Winkler here) pretending to need a job. But there’s a different kind of glamour in going undercover, and Carrère and co-writer Hélène Devynck were keen to explore the impulse that drives a journalist to role-play in this way. Binoche was more than game for the kind of self-effacement the role would require, stripping away the beauty makeup that made her a star and a Lancôme spokesmodel. His adaptation would focus on what Aubenas underwent to write her book: the process of relocating from Paris to the northern port city of Caen, of reinventing herself as a down-on-her-luck divorcée, and of slowly gaining the confidence of the women she planned to write about. ![]() Instead of simply making “In Cold Blood,” he’d want to do “Capote,” so to speak. If Carrère were to tell this story, it would necessarily involve the ethical and emotional struggles Aubenas went through during her research. He too places himself at the center of his work, taking certain liberties in the process. ![]() Though Carrère has previously directed two films, “Back to Kotelnigh” (a documentary) and “The Moustache” (based on his own novel), he’s better known in France as an author and a nonfiction innovator. ![]()
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