Between Two Worlds: Juliette Binoche scrubs toilets, problematically

Early on in this misguided, well-intentioned drama, Juliette Binoche’s Marianne is quizzed at a local job centre. Why, asks the agent, does someone of her means wish to enter the ranks of France’s zero-hour contract, zero prospects, scarcely-surviving, minimum wage cleaners? Marianne argues that she wants to make these unseen workers visible to the public, a motivation that makes for a queasy premise.

Loosely adapted from the 2010 French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham by undercover journalist Florence Aubenas, Between Two Worlds sends Marianne to the thankless ferry route between Ouistreham and Portsmouth, where a squad of cleaners toil in the early morning hours to get the rooms ready for their next inhabitants.

Watching Juliette Binoche, one of the world’s most recognisable actors, as she scrubs lavatories, the audience simply cannot forget – not for a solitary second – that they are watching a movie star scrubbing a lavatory.

There’s an interesting contrast to be made with Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland and with Frances McDormand’s Oscar-winning performance. Zhao spends months – and sometimes years – immersing herself in the underprivileged communities she documents. McDormand, too, became a confidant and chum to the real transient workers she encountered among America’s “rubber tramps”.

To be fair, Emmanuel Carrère’s film seems aware of the disingenuousness at the heart of its protagonist’s quest. The director sensitively employs non-professionals, including some of the characters featured in Aubenas’s book. Still, this remains Marianne’s story.

The film’s biggest dilemma concerns her revelation about her true purpose – and cushy Parisian origins – to her co-workers. Despite her journalistic ambitions, she is rather less like Jack London in The People of the Abyss or George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, than she is an approximation of the figure Jarvis Cocker sings about in Common People.

Marianne may learn to “pass” for a cleaner – kind of – but she can never experience the precariousness faced by her subjects. Her idea that these people are entirely invisible is bogus from the get-go. The script wrestles with these problems but it simply cannot overcome them.