French writer and director Emmanuel Carrere decided to make his first feature film after more than 15 years, and the book of investigative journalist Florence Aubenas served as a template. A few years ago, she decided to investigate what life looks like for the French white lower, working class, women who do the lowest paid jobs, and headed to the city of Caen in the north of France where no one knows her. She got a job as a cleaner working for the minimum wage, got to know many locals and people who are really condemned to do such jobs all their lives, and then she wrote the book “Ouistreham” (as the film is called in the original), which immediately became a bestseller.
And all that I wrote in the above entry is actually a huge spoiler, because those who did not find out about the film only after a good half hour of the film find out that the cleaner Marianne Winckler (Juliette Binoche) is actually there undercover and that she is a writer who plans to write a novel. That spoiler can also be found in the short description of the film on IMDB, and from the very beginning it is completely clear that Marianne does not fit into that world at all. She presents herself as a divorcee whose husband was rich, and when he left her for a younger man, she immediately lost everything and traveled to the north of France to do anything. And we see her like that in the introduction to the job interview where we hear those standard CV quotes about teamwork, motivation, this, that for the lowest paid job out there.
Miraculously, she will soon get a job as a cleaner and will very quickly start connecting with her colleagues who live there, poor white French people who barely make ends meet. Maranne can’t understand, for example, how the guy she met can’t collect 250 euros to pay a traffic fine, because of which his car was confiscated. So don’t you have any friends, one lends you 30, another 50, the third 40 euros and you get it together quickly, Marianne asks her new friend, and he answers that none of his friends have a euro to lend. Only then does Marianne partially realize that she is really stuck between two worlds and that she will never be able to fully understand how such people really live.
Of course, she hides her intentions, or the idea of writing a book about the lives of cleaners, from all those colleagues with whom she is friends and who see her as one of them. And they have no reason to doubt because these are people who don’t really have time to read books and culture sections in newspapers to know who Marianne really is, and she will be especially intrigued by the slightly rebellious and wild Chrystele, a young single mother of three sons. Even though Binoche is the only professional here, while all the other characters were embodied by naturalists Carrere found in the north of France, it didn’t quite feel as realistic as I’d hoped, and it didn’t manage to avoid the occasional lapse into melodramatics. An opportunity to make a better film was missed, and watching “Between Two Worlds” it’s impossible not to think what, for example, the great master of social drama Ken Loach would have made of it.