Emmanuel Carrére’s Between Two Worlds is a loose adaptation of Florence Aubenas’s The Night Cleaner, an autobiographical exposé of France’s gig economy. While the book primarily documents the fatiguing, baldly exploitative labor of cleaning up after others, the film places its emphasis more on the interpersonal dramas between the women to whom such labor disproportionately falls. It takes things a step further by exploring the knock-on effects of undercover investigative journalism on those same relationships.
Between Two Worlds follows Marianne Winkler (Juliette Binoche), a recently divorced homemaker who arrives in the port city of Caen and finds herself thrust into job market for the first time. An employment agency funnels her into the “industry of the future” as a “maintenance agent”—a euphemism so transparent that it further dehumanizes what it’s meant to humanize. After training, she cobbles together cleaning gigs and, in the process, befriends the cynical yet warmhearted Christèle (Hélène Lambert) and the young, love-smitten Marilou (Léa Carne). The three end up as night cleaners on the ferry that lands at nearby Ouistreham. It’s a grueling job, the last resort of desperate workers, largely immigrants and women.
Around a half hour into Between Two Worlds, we learn that Marianne isn’t who she claims to be. She, like Aubenas, is a writer working undercover to experience the cleaning industry from within. As such, Carrére’s film temporarily puts the audience in the same situation as Christèle and Marilou, who believe that Marianne is one of them. From here on, the film’s English title becomes increasingly apt, as the protagonist grows closer to Christèle especially, settling into an unconditional camaraderie that’s been forged only through shared labor, while at the same time knowing that when she publishes her book, she, too, will be exposed.
Here it becomes clearer what likely drew Carrére to adapt this particular story for the screen: Carrére is perhaps best known for his 1986 novel The Moustache and its film adaptation, which are also concerned with the tenuousness of identity. As Marianne attempts to simultaneously inhabit two “worlds,” or social classes, the tension ramps up. It’s only a matter of time before her mask slips, transforming Between Two Worlds into something like a spy thriller, but without the film ever losing sight of its political themes. In fact, they’re amplified.
Marianne may be seeking to expose the exploitation of workers like Christèle and Marilou, but in her worthy attempt to help people in general, she runs the risk of hurting these particular individuals. By centering Christèle in its opening and closing scenes, with Marianne’s book not having fundamentally altered her life, Between Two Worlds, as written by Aubenas, Carrére, and Hélène Devynck, insists on depicting her as a person and not a mere representative case.
After publishing her exposé to a certain amount of fanfare, as the packed house for her reading and signing implies, Marianne settles back into her normal and comfortable life, leaving Christèle and Marilou to fend for themselves. Christèle in particular feels betrayed but proposes that Marianne work one last shift on the ferry, to prove that her friends aren’t beneath her. Marianne, though, calls the idea “nonsense” and Christèle ends their friendship.
Between Two Worlds clearly suggests that Marianne’s book has inadvertently rigidified class divisions, not only because her foray into precarity is temporary, but because it exploits her friend without consent. Even so, Christèle gives Marianne this chance to show solidarity and resolve the contraction between her project and their friendship. In the end, Marianne’s decision to dismiss Christèle’s proposal is tragic but also by no means inevitable.
Compared to the surprising nuance and resonance of its telling, Between Two Worlds has an oddly sanitized look about it. All the filth that Christèle and Marilou have little choice but to clean up is kept out of sight. As the cinematographic equivalent of the euphemistic “I’d prefer not to see that” attitude that the film attempts to upend, it seems addressed to the same middle-class audience as Marianne’s—and, by extension, Aubenas’s—book.
The uncompromising ending of Between Two Worlds demonstrates an awareness of the political inertia of Marianne and her milieu. As such, it invites the film’s audience to proceed from the awareness of exploitation that works like Aubenas’s bring and toward a substantive confrontation with the status quo. The impact on social consciousness of an isolated film is, of course, tricky to measure, though each may contribute to an overarching culture of resistance. You may wonder if this film’s impact could have been deepened had it risked the bottom line by showing some actual shit and vomit, which, after all, come out of everyone, rich and poor.
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This appears remarkable similar to the experiences of the late journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who spent some time in the 1990s working undercover as a cleaner, which she published under the title Nickel and Dimed in 2001. In it, she wrote: “When someone works for less pay than she can live on … she has made a great sacrifice for you … The “working poor” … are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone.”