To go back in film history to 1941, one of the greatest comedies – Sullivan’s Travels – shows a rich Hollywood director who decides that his silly movies ignore the harsh realities of life in The Great Depression. He decides to go among the poor to make a movie about their plight. His butler warns that a rich man studying poverty is a bad idea. In a new movie, French writer and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds does the same thing with a character who wants to tell the world about poverty. It’s still an iffy idea.
At the start, Marianne Winckler, (Juliette Binoche), is looking for work. As she meets with an employment counselor, a desperate single mother interrupts, furious that she’s getting the runaround. Marianne stays patient. Her resume lists a law degree, but she says since she divorced, she’s been broke.
Even early in the picture, something feels off. At a job fair, she tells a company rep that cleaning has always been her passion. Becoming a cleaning lady is honorable work, but it’s hard to believe it’s a life passion. Marianne also describes events in a voice-over, as if she keeps a diary.
“I stick to the rule,” she writes, “no contact with my life in Paris.” So what is Marianne up to – because she’s not a divorcee facing hard times.
The subject is betrayal. Marianne is actually a known author writing a book about people stuck in rotten jobs. She grows close to Crystèle (Hélène Lambert) the woman who’d interrupted the meeting with the job counselor. But Crystèle is genuine; she doesn’t need a book, or a writer, to tell her she’s trapped. She needs a real friend.
Crystèle gets Marianne a job with her cleaning cabins on a ferry between France and England. For bad pay, they make beds and clean toilets under harsh time pressure. The two women connect. Crystèle and her three young kids make a birthday party for Marianne and she’s upfront about everything, while Marianne is not.
Like the films of the Belgian Dardenne brothers or Britain’s Ken Loach, Between Two Worlds exposes the no-way-out world of the working poor. The workers on the cleaning crew work too many shifts. Marianne is a good reporter. She describes the physical pain from making high and low bunk beds and bending over to do the toilets. And she sees the larger picture – that these workers are so beaten down by their jobs that they can’t break free to find something better. Crystèle is certain she will never get out of this life.
Between Two Worlds also makes suspense about betrayal in the way Alfred Hitchcock did over and over. The audience knows Marianne’s secret and endures the tension to see what Crystèle will do when she finds out.
The great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman said that the real subject of film is the human face. As Crystèle’s face rarely changes. Crystèle is angry and distrustful, and in her few light moments, her smile and laugh only highlight her elemental fury at her lot in life. Whereas Marianne is a marvel of subtle shifts in expression. She’s a sophisticated Parisian: she knows she’s lying to her friend. She’s decided consciously that publishing the book is worth hurting this vulnerable and much younger woman, but she’s not confident about that choice, and it’s all there in her face – the wariness, the doubts. Binoche is one of the fine actors of our time, and she’s never been better than she is in Between Two Worlds.
