BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Between Two Worlds, Cohen Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 10, 2023

Between Two Worlds is both based on and a critique of a non-fiction book by Florence Aubenas, a French journalist who spent half a year undercover as an ordinary gig worker in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. On its face, the story is fascinating and despairing about the everyday struggles of ordinary people working themselves to exhaustion simply to make ends meet. More than a decade after the publication of Aubenas' book, co-writer/director Emmanuel Carrère possesses the time, distance, and knowledge of how this economy has become the new standard. The filmmaker has some potent questions about the writer's methods and whether or not her exposé actually accomplished anything.

In the film, Juliette Binoche plays an Aubenas stand-in, named Marianne Winckler, for the purposes of dramatization and, likely, to offer some fairness to what must have been the author's good intentions. We first meet Marianne as just another financially struggling person. She says she's recently divorced from a well-to-do philanderer, has no work experience since graduating from law school and not needing employment on account of her marriage, and now needs a job to keep a tiny apartment in her new home city.

A visit to the local employment office doesn't provide much aid, although that seems to be the trend if another woman's experience there is any indication. She's Chrystèle (Hélène Lambert), a working single mother of three, who desperately needs to maintain some form of steady employment to continue receiving government benefits to provide for her children, and despite constantly working various cleaning jobs wherever and whenever they pop up, her representative at the office has failed to update Chrystèle's file.

Binoche's performance is an inherently tricky one, in that we're observing and making conclusions about Marianne from one perspective at the start of this story, even though the character is, as the title suggests, living a double life and aware of her role as an outsider in this world. For example, Chrystèle arrives just before Marianne is supposed to meet with the same representative, and what appears to be a look of general sympathy for this stranger on Marianne's face in that moment is actually much more.

The only reason the representative can't go over Chrystèle's case now is because of her appointment with Marianne. If Marianne is who she says she is, of course, this is just a matter of unfortunate timing. If she isn't, Marianne has put herself in the way of this stranger's well-being.

Obviously, the earlier description of Aubenas' book has already given away a key revelation within the narrative. It's also, though, one that's vital to understanding how and why this screenplay, written by Carrère and Hélène Devynck, goes deeper than simply presenting a slice-of-life depiction of economic survival under tough, seemingly impossible conditions.

The film mirrors Aubenas' approach of simply observing how people like Chrystèle, Marilou (Léa Carne), and so many others, whose names we might catch but whose faces are unmistakably familiar, work and work under harsh conditions, measuring their lives and bank accounts in terms of the math of minimum wage and hours. It also, though, goes a step further in observing the observer, taking measure of how her inherent deception might and does affect real people like the one she's pretending to be.

Binoche, then, must play the part of someone playing a part, trying not to give away who she actually is—a woman with steady employment and comparatively lucrative income. Marianne is tempted on a few occasions to tell the truth, especially as she and Chrystèle, who becomes the central focus of the narrative she's piecing together during her downtime, become close friends. She feels guilty about the deception, for sure, but whom do such emotions benefit beyond herself?

There's another scene here, in which Chrystèle surprises Marianne—who happily takes a car on unpaid loan from another working-class woman and gives Chrystèle rides to work—with a little birthday party. Marianne cherishes the gift—a shamrock pendant—Chrystèle and her three sons give to her, swearing to herself that she'll always wear it and be buried with it, but toward what else could the money spent on that gift be put? Marianne might not ask that question, but because Carrère lets us know the character's real position and forces us to see past her noble intentions of shining a little on this economic situation, we certainly have to ask it.

Even with this specific goal in mind, though, the film does also serve as a dramatized exposé of people on the economic fringes, who are potentially one missed shift or lost opportunity away from ruin. Most of the gigs involving cleaning for others, becoming invisible, completely unappreciated, and the target of employers' ire—even as they're asked to make hasty but thorough work, to find ways of putting their lives on hold for the jobs, and to gratefully accept these conditions, lest that ruin come. In between the draining toiling of cleaning public restrooms and show homes and the quarters of a ferry that has a notorious reputation for being the hardest gig, Carrère gives us a sense of the dreams of those who still have them, as well as Chrystèle's cynical acceptance that this has become her station in life.

This may be Marianne's story, but Between Two Worlds is wise and critical enough to know and show us how it doesn't belong to her. This is a compassionate story, although not cloyingly so, and also a tough assessment of the role of the visiting storyteller within it.

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