BETWEEN TWO WORLDS – Review

Juliette Binoche stars as a prosperous writer who goes undercover to research her next non-fiction book, an expose of the exploitative working conditions of French people near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, in director Emmanuel Carrère’s BETWEEN TWO WORLDS. Marianne (Binoche) poses as a divorced job seeker with a thin work history who is only offered part-time, minimum-wage jobs as a cleaner. She joins the ranks of other poor women, and some men, unable to find full-time work who are forced to cobble together a bare living doing several of these hard, unpleasant jobs. Eventually, Marianne finds herself in one of the worst, cleaning the ferry that runs between France and Britain.

Based on the non-fiction book “Le Quai de Ouistreham” (“The Night Cleaner”), Juliette Binoche is excellent as Marianne, as she immerses herself in the cleaners’ work and their world, forming human bonds as she shares their lives. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS shows us these workers’ difficult lives but Marianne’s good intentions to inform the world about them is complicated by her deception as she becomes close to some of her co-workers, raising the question what happens when her fellow low-wage cleaners learn she was only a visitor in their hard world.

Of her limited choices, Marianne picks cleaning jobs as the ones she feels most qualified to handle and immerses herself in the round of job fairs and word-of-mouth hunts for cleaning offices and public facilities. Most of these low-wage workers, primarily women, work more than one of these part-time jobs, while dreaming of full-time work.

While writing a non-fiction book to expose the harsh working conditions is admirable, Marianne’s use of deceit to get close to them is much less so. Early on, a social worker figures out who Marianne is and what she is doing, and scolds her for both the deceit and for taking a job that these other women need to simply survive. Although the social worker ultimately decides to no say anything, the point of the morally-murky nature of what the author is doing has been made, and lingers with us throughout.

She meets many people who are kind to her but everyone’s money is so tight that any little extra expense can push them over the edge, or cause them to lose one of the jobs. She starts to hear rumors about a job of last resort, the worst, which is cleaning the ferry that runs between France and Britain. The work is hard, unpleasant, and must be done in the short time the ferry is docked. Yet she finds a surprising camaraderie among this overworked souls.

Marianne intends to make an ensemble of people the subjects of her book but is so taken with one of them, that she decides to make her the center of it. Chrystèle (an excellent Hélène Lambert) is a single mother whose only option is the ferry job. She is more aloof than most but Marienne works to win her confidence. As she does, we can see real friendship developing between them. But what will happen after the truth comes out, as it must at some point.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS shows us these workers’ difficult lives but Marianne’s good intentions to inform the world about them is complicated by her deception as she becomes close to some of her co-workers, raising the question what happens when her fellow low-wage cleaners learn she was only a visitor in their hard world.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, in French with English subtitles, opens Friday, Aug. 25, in theaters.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars