(Credit: TIFF)

Juliette Binoche’s latest starring role is in an engaging and thoughtful dramatisation by acclaimed French director Emmanuel Carrère. Between Two Worlds delves into the lives of low-wage workers dealing with unemployment, job insecurity, and the struggle to remain afloat financially in the face of minimal payment and limited work hours. It is based on the best-selling memoir Le Quai de Ouistreham by French journalist Florence Aubenas, which describes the findings resulting from Aubenas’ research, conducted by posing as a janitorial worker, as well as the unexpected insights she gained from working closely and forming friendships with cleaning staff. Between Two Worlds, released in France as Ouistreham, is a partly fictionalised adaptation of Aubenas’ work.

Binoche plays Marianne Winckler, a successful journalist and author. She first appears as a woman apparently searching for work at an employment centre in Caen, who explains she was a housewife left penniless after her husband abandoned her. She accepts a job cleaning guest cabins on a ferry, described as fast, tough work, for minimal pay. This initial scene provides some hint of what these workers deal with: one woman in the employment office has suddenly lost her benefits and faces homelessness due to a clerical error, while another walks hours to and from jobs, having no other means of transportation. The jobs available may involve either erratic, short-term work, leaving workers struggling to find enough hours to earn a living, or else shifts of up to seventeen hours.

Marianne quickly adapts to the hard work and hurried schedule and quietly takes in the details of her colleagues’ lives. A voice-over account by Marianne describes the pressure and exhaustion that is a part of the job but allows visuals of the women actually working to tell most of the story. There is an understated condemnation of whatever system or authority allows this to be the last resort for unlucky job-seekers, many of them pushed into woefully inadequate work situations by any number of factors: being the sole caretaker of children, poor health, previous terminations, or what one worker insists is literal bad luck.

It emerges, early in the film, that Marianne is actually a journalist, going undercover to find out more about low-wage workers and their situation. When speaking to people familiar with her real identity, she explains that she has read a great deal about the plight of low-wage labourers, but always written by people with no experience in living that kind of life, no direct knowledge of the uncertainty, insecurity, degradation, and stress that goes with it. Marianne decided to live as a cleaner, hopefully enabling her to write her planned exposé from experience, if only short-term experience.

The film does not, however, spend time on political commentary or accusations, taking it for granted that the situation is unacceptable. The main body of the story is the relationship among the women working together, their mutual support, their sharing of troubles, and their genuine friendship, which are portrayed realistically but with great warmth.

Juliette Binoche brings across Marianne’s growing ambivalence about her position, as she comes to know her fellow cleaners as individuals, accepting the other women’s friendship, and their trust and confidence, on the assumption that she is one of them while knowing she is only playing a role and has a security and status none of them could hope to achieve. She and her supposed colleagues, she realises, really live in two separate worlds. This uncertainty grows as she participates in events – birthday parties, an impromptu caste-breaking overnight gathering, and a touchingly earnest celebration when a woman in their cleaning crew gets an actual, permanent, full-time job.

The final act deals with Marianne’s deception being uncovered and the aftermath, including the publication of her book, in a carefully nuanced way, examining the relative places of Marianne and her former co-workers, both challenging assumptions and thwarting viewers’ expectations about an appropriate ending to the story. An unexpected twist and a reminder of who and what Marianne left behind serve to make its final point clear. A typically great performance by Juliette Binoche, backed by a solid supporting cast and a carefully managed storyline, provides a revealing and sensitive account of often overlooked lives.