Between Two Worlds (Entre Deux Mondes)

 

Director Emmanuel Carrère

The director on the set

ensemble cast

Florence Aubenas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Between Two Worlds (Entre Deux Mondes)             B                                                             aka:  Ouistreham                                                                                                                       France  (106 mi)  2021  ‘Scope  d: Emmanuel Carrère

The Great Recession of 2008 was a global economic downturn that devastated world financial markets as well as the banking and real estate industries, especially in the United States and Western Europe.  Bank foreclosures worldwide caused millions of people to lose their life savings, their jobs, and their homes, where after a period of economic stagnation in 2008, France suffered the longest period of economic decline and its worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, wiping out all economic growth since 2000.  When a financial crisis of that magnitude disrupts an economy, it’s followed by a panicked wave of unemployment, where one in five employees lost their jobs, basically losing everything, many never obtaining real work again, instead roaming through a labyrinthian network of temporary jobs, wandering from place to place, season to season, like migratory workers.  The effects of the downturn were felt for many more years.  From 2010 through 2014 multiple European countries, including Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus, defaulted on their national debts, forcing the European Union to provide them with “bailout” loans and cash investments, compelling them to implement “austerity” measures to repay their debts.  That is the backdrop to this film, a social realist, working class drama that recalls Chloé Zhao’s 2021 #5 Film of the Year Nomadland (2020), continually blurring the lines between fiction and documentary.  Loosely based on the 2010 non-fiction book Le Quai de Ouistreham (The Night Cleaner) by Belgian-born French journalist Florence Aubenas, reporting in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis, having spent months with a fake identity working undercover as a cleaner to investigate and expose the hardships of workers at the marginalized end of society, whose services are essential, yet they remain invisible to a larger society that simply overlooks what they do and chooses not to see them, something along the lines of George Orwell’s autobiographical first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, which details prolonged periods of hunger, taking odd jobs to avoid destitution, and living among the working poor.  Actress Juliette Binoche, who also produced the film, persisted for years in getting this brought to the screen, taking most of a decade to realize the project, eventually persuading the author to agree to an adaptation.  Aubenas hand-picked the director who co-wrote the screenplay along with his ex-wife, journalist Hélène Devynck, agreeing to have the film adapted only if Emmanuel Carrère, winner of numerous literary awards and one of the country’s best-known authors of literary nonfiction, would direct, making his first film since 2005.  Carrère writes nonfiction, or what he calls “nonfiction novels,” an unclassifiable mix of personal history, reportage, philosophy, and theology, where his books combine journalistic reporting with first-person confession. While preparing for her role in Leos Carax’s The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991), Binoche spent some time as a homeless person in order to bring a truthfulness to her role.  According to Carrère, “Juliette navigated the actors at least as much as I did, not by giving them instructions, but through the way she acted with them.”  Shot by Patrick Blossier, who also shot Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) (1985), there’s nothing picturesque about this film, where there are many grey and rainy days, typical of northern France, finding ourselves in a dreary landscape of port infrastructures, bureaucratic office spaces, concrete buildings, highways, and supermarkets, while the non-intrusive musical soundtrack was composed by Mathieu Lamboley.

At the center of the film is Juliette Binoche, stripped of all artifices as the undercover journalist Marianne Winckler, a prestigious Parisian journalist in a fictionalized version of Aubenas, inspired by the process she devised in writing the book.  This stylistic maneuver has been used before by Sam Fuller in his savagely disturbing SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963), where an ambitious reporter feigns madness in order to be committed to a mental institution where he intends to uncover the truth behind a murder that happened there, a film that grows dangerously unhinged and grotesquely surreal.  This film plays it unerringly straight, expressed with a blistering real-life intensity, becoming a social critique of class differences, in line with the neo-realist work of Ken Loach or the Dardenne brothers, though lacking their biting sharpness and unique storytelling ability, resulting in an exposé that paints a disturbing portrait of what this backbreaking and exploitative work is like for people struggling to survive during a global recession.  At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, people who stocked the shelves or worked the cash registers in a supermarket or provided for patients in hospitals were applauded, as suddenly everyone was aware of how valuable their work can be, even if you ignore them in everyday life.  However, more than two years later, their mundane achievements are largely taken for granted again, still performing essential work, but largely underappreciated and ignored.  In order to achieve as much authenticity as possible, Binoche is surrounded by a cast of unprofessionals, some of whom actually do this work for a living, yet what really stands out is that Binoche defers to them, allowing the spotlight to shine on her co-stars, the workers of the thankless jobs Marianne is trying to get to know and understand, whose work is defined by daily humiliation, time pressure, and poor pay.  While the film delivers a bleak message, it shifts its attention to the relationships Marianne forms with the people she meets, largely women, where she ends up developing close friendships in the six months they worked together, while also contending with the job-seeking Cédric (Didier Pupin), who is always looking for a woman at his side, and routinely flirts with her.  Having to answer why there is a 23-year gap in her resumé, her standard answer is that she was a stay-at-home mom whose husband left her, forcing her to fend for herself in a workplace competing for jobs with people half her age.  Now she’s broke and willing to do anything, looking for a fresh start in Caen, a small city in Normandy where she doesn’t know anyone, receiving training as a temp for a cleaning service, fired almost immediately from her first assignment for failing to show complete subservience toward an impatient supervisor, eventually assigned to a night team cleaning the cabins on the ferry that runs between the small port of Ouistreham in northwestern France and Portsmouth, England, strategically timed with the unloading of departing passengers and loading of arriving passengers.  About a half hour into the film, we learn Marianne’s backstory is completely fabricated, discovered by her contact at the unemployment agency who thought she looked familiar, eventually recognizing her, having read her last book. Marianne insists on taking temp work only, never taking a job away from someone else in need, so the counselor agrees to maintain her secrecy, with much of the rest of the film playing out like a thriller, awaiting the inevitable disclosure of her true identity.  The weakness of the film is it feels relentlessly downbeat and overly one note, with relatively few surprises, where watching a cleaning crew at work is not what drives viewers to the cinema.  

In the opening scene at the unemployment office, Marianne is overshadowed by the appearance of Chrystèle, played by Hélène Lambert, an undiscovered talent who is the overriding force of the film, literally stealing every scene, showing great dramatic flair as a free-spirited single mother who abruptly cuts in line and insists on seeing someone, facing potential homelessness due to a clerical error, as she complied with their directions but was cut off welfare, with claims they never received the unemployment form that she hand-delivered, now having no funds to feed her three kids.  From the look of sheer exasperation on her face, it’s abundantly clear this is not the first time something like this has happened.  The combative ruckus she creates draws attention, something described as Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers in Tom Wolfe’s sarcastically incisive 1970 essay, but it exemplifies the kinds of things that can happen, a bureaucratic error for some, just a glitch in the system, but a life threatening situation for others.  This takes us into the lurid world of people living from pay check to pay check, a group that sees things from a completely different perspective than the middle class who have options, as they are protected by a safety net.  The people on the bottom do the most ruthlessly backbreaking work, with no days off, subject to termination if they’re late or miss a day, with the longest hours and lowest wages and little else to show for it, having lost all illusions and hopes in life.  While these are French citizens, the situation for immigrants is much tougher, as we see the police harassing the Sudanese homeless on the streets, taking their blankets and sandals that help fend off the morning cold, appearing like shadows wandering the port in the dim of light.  The film is largely a choreographed precision of rhythms in carrying out what amounts to the most grueling work, arriving in the dark of the morning just before dawn, routinely cleaning up other people’s shit and vomit, assigned to the “commando operation” where they’re on the clock cleaning 230 cabins in just 90-minutes before the ship departs, where they have to make beds, clean toilets, and wipe the floor, the vast majority of whom are women, allowing just 3 to 4-minutes per room.  The speed and repetitive routine the work requires takes a severe physical toll on the body, where the job satisfaction is non-existent, yet in a competitive market workers falling by the wayside are easily replaced.  Some of this resembles Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023), but there’s no time for reflection, as it’s a crash course in nonstop work.  Working as a team alongside Chrystèle and the love-smitten 18-year old Marilou (Léa Carne), who naïvely believes this is only a stage in her life, Marianne is occasionally seen stepping aside to jot notes in a notebook, entering an increasingly difficult ethical dilemma, at times feeling like a traitor, as the other workers who befriend and accept her as one of their own will have to eventually learn she has betrayed their trust.  There is an internal thread with Binoche providing a dry, existential narration of what she discovers, but also pleasant scenes of taking diversions to the beach with Chrystèle, something she’s obviously unfamiliar with, where she may as well be visiting an alien planet, having no concept whatsoever of the idea of taking time for relaxation, with literally zero down time in her life.  Rather than a collective exposé of an exploited workforce, much of this turns into a character profile piece on Chrystèle, where there are heartwarming scenes of Marianne spending time together with her kids, actually celebrating her birthday, where she’s generously gifted a necklace that she treasures, as it’s something they clearly cannot afford.  Ending on an ambiguous note, with no clear answers, her secret is exposed when the two worlds collide in the most unforeseen manner, a completely awkward moment that blindsides Chrystèle, immediately growing bitter at the façade of work and friendship, feeling like she took advantage of their relationship after opening up her life and offering real insight into the role of an underclass in French society.  Whatever positives may come from the book, hoping to make the invisible visible, she’s the one most affected by the pretense of somebody pretending to be someone they’re not, shattered to the core by the deception, questioning the moral conundrum of how lies can significantly affect the pursuit of truth, and whether friendships can transcend the seemingly insurmountable divide between class barriers, as unlike Marianne, who returns to a comfortable bougie life she can’t even imagine, Chrystèle has no fallback position, literally no other options but to succumb to the agonizing abyss of an endless cycle of mind-numbing work.   

The Captive (La Captive)

 

Director Chantal Akerman

THE CAPTIVE (La Captive)             B+                                                                              France  Belgium  (118 mi)  2000  d: Chantal Akerman

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

—Marcel Proust, Chapter 1, La Prisonnière, 1923

I thought that literary works should not be adapted to film, that music should not be used, that cuts and shots/counter-shots should not be used – these kinds of prohibitions.  I was very radical, undoubtedly too much so, but I needed to be in order to define myself, form myself as a filmmaker.

—Chantal Akerman, 2001

Listed by Cahiers du Cinéma as their #2 film of 2000, it must be said that literary adaptations are not something typically associated with experimental or auteurist directors, though Godard and Truffaut made several films based on literary sources.  Akerman was an avid reader since adolescence and initially skeptical about literary adaptations, believing they were diametrically opposed to her radically innovative film style, alternating between fiction and documentaries, writing her own scripts, nonetheless, having read Proust when still in school, she began to toy with the idea of adapting Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927) just after she completed Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976).  But it was only 25 years later, after having experimented with a wide range of genres and film styles, that she felt ready to try again, with the help of film scholar Eric De Kuyper who shared script ideas, though Akerman wrote every word, inspired by their mutual admiration for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964), eventually making a film loosely inspired by the fifth volume, La Prisonnière.  While Proust’s modernist style and narrative complexity have deterred directors, believing the work is unadaptable, in particular the existential interior focus, as it follows the narrator’s autobiographical recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood, but it was precisely these challenges that attracted Akerman’s interest, where she is quoted as saying, “I remembered that there was that apartment, and the corridor, and the two characters—I said, that’s a story for me.”  Having come from experimental traditions, where nearly all her films deal with captivity and the many forms it can take, this is a study of women as an enigma, in particular lesbian desire, explored exclusively through a male perspective, yet what’s exceedingly fascinating is a lesbian filmmaker’s vision of a gay writer’s work.  The first of Proust’s books published posthumously, this is a complex and multi-layered  novel, with its fabulous cast of characters, its rich evocation of a Belle Époque period and society and, above all, its intricate plot, with Proust conceiving love as tragic, becoming a film about the haunting effect of memories and fantasies, where there’s something completely disorienting about this film that mirrors Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), revered for its suspense, hypnotic camerawork, and astute character psychology, even matching Hitchcock’s rear projection effects out the back of the car, but even more importantly both films accentuate how the destructive male obsessions of projecting their own desires onto unsuspecting women have disastrous consequences.  Opening and closing with the sounds of the sea, we’re introduced to Stanislas Mehrar as Simon, a spoiled and wealthy young man who is initially seen watching Super 8 homemade video of a woman with friends during their seaside summer together in Normandy, freezing the frame like a still image of her face, before transitioning into her silent stalker, Akerman’s version of Truffaut’s Jean-Pierre Léaud, both dressed in a suit and tie, each a narcissistic voyeur of young women.  Completely obsessed with Ariane (Sylvie Testud), the camera follows him through a labrynthian journey through Paris as he tails her car (a Peugeot convertible), follows her footsteps in the city, where the heightened shadows on the staircase walls recall film noir, leading into the Musée Rodin, filled with sculptures, paintings, and art objects, where she finds herself pausing in front of an Aphrodite bust, a creature who emerged from the sea, perhaps an ideal representative of the female form, becoming an encounter between the real and the mythical, where Ariane is ultimately viewed as one of his prized collectibles, having no identity of her own, as she appears to exist only in his fantasies.  The formal precision of Sabine Lancelin’s camera has a hovering presence, following them both closely, with Simon watching from an adjacent room, his moves repeating hers as she appears and disappears, always just out of his grasp, where their forms are merged into the same frame.  In something of a surprise, we discover she is living with him in his aging grandmother’s massive home with her own room, where she is something of a willing prisoner, passively following his every wish, which is spelled out in great detail.  One of the unforgettable scenes has them bathing together, but in separate tubs, as there is a frosted glass pane between them, which is not initially recognizable, where it appears Simon is talking to himself in an extended monologue that veers into explicit sexual references, still quite surprising in this day and age, as if drawn from the pages of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, but eventually she casually responds as the camera pulls back allowing a fuller perspective, with Ariane, seen naked behind the screen, becoming a shadowy presence, as if lurking only in his imagination. 

Volker Schlöndorf made his Proust film SWANN IN LOVE in 1984 and Raúl Ruiz his TIME REGAINED in 1999, both partial adaptations, but sadly, Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay that was never filmed, while the Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey projects from the 1970’s were never realized.  Having the self-reflective quality of Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959) and My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962), the minimalist existential quandary of Bresson’s Une Femme Douce (1969) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971), yet also the feel of one of Rohmer’s moral tales of alienated youth, what’s striking, however, especially for a Chantal Akerman film, a director known for her ruminative observations of women, is how the film sticks with the male perspective, as everything is seen through his naïve eyes, literally everything.  Women are viewed as something for him to possess, forcing viewers into experiencing the excruciating yet pervasive oppression of male patriarchy, a viewpoint that borders on the absurd by his inability to comprehend anything about the mindset of his female lover, as his jealous suspicions overshadow everything he knows and feels about her.  This is a highly stylized, intensely personal art film that is not for everyone, very slow in pace, where not much happens, yet the subdued charm and dispassionate manner in which things are realized defies realism, feeling more theatrical or surreal, as if sleepwalking through a dream, fixated on nonsensical recurring phrases, where the absurdly sounding dialogue could just as easily be spoken by Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  With the protagonists renamed from the source material of Albertine and Marcel, most of the key scenes of Simon’s tormented relations with Ariane remain intact, as this is a plunge into the suffocating effects of jealousy in a contemporary love affair, with Akerman ridding herself of the historical context of Proust’s novel, so there is no looking into the past, no remembrance, yet she was spellbound by the actual dialogue, but the most radical changes come from the ending, which turns into a kind of road movie reminiscent of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), offering a liberating release from the confined enclosure of the Parisian apartment, which feels more like a tomb.  Simon is a sickly recluse, subject to allergies and pollen, and mostly confined to his room, where he looks pale, like a ghost, often seen alone in his room reading the newspaper, or frustrated by his writings, his bedside surrounded by notebooks, yet continually perplexed by that blank page he never seems to fill.  While Ariane dutifully comes to Simon’s room when requested, he also enters her room while she sleeps, or appears to be sleeping, offering no hint of resistance, allowing him to “do what he likes,” which only frustrates him even more, where so little is known about her inner nature, always present, yet sexually elusive, as we never see him shed his clothes or alter his extreme sense of bourgeois reserve, suggesting there is an overwhelming sense of detachment that defines them.  Despite her unconditional availability, she is indifferent and emotionally vacant, where there is little reciprocal intimacy, with Simon sensing that she’s holding out on him, as she’s evasive in her noncommittal responses or explanations about where she’s been, using one of her friends, Andrée (Olivia Bonamy), to basically spy on her and report back to him, yet she’s equally vague, amusingly omitting or forgetting details (like they may be having an affair!) while reporting contradictory information back to him, where he has this incessant need to control and have ownership over every facet of Ariane’s life, insisting there be no secrets between them.  However, he’s under the impression that she may actually prefer the company of women, frenetically driven to understand the secret of what women do together, suspecting she may be having an affair with a female opera star, Léa (Aurore Clément), brilliantly realized in a balcony scene where Ariane amateurishly sings a love duet from Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti with a more professionally sounding older woman (Sophie Assante) from an opposite window, Prendero quel brunettino I Cosi fan tutte - Glyndebourne YouTube (3:07), while Simon powerlessly watches the scene from below, as if appearing in someone else’s dream.  So this turns into something of a detective story, expressed through voyeurism and his insatiable need for control, as he has an obsessive curiosity about what she does on her own, with an overcontrolling nature that blinds him to any existing connection between them, while also ignoring any fascination with the world outside.  

Premiering at Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, but never released commercially in the United States, made between two rare excursions into lighthearted comedies, this somber work is a modernist melodrama that elaborates on the styles, themes, and moods of other melodramas dating back to the silent era, becoming a study of pathological jealousy and unfulfilled desire, yet what’s remarkable is that Simon verbalizes every thought in an extremely rational and analytic manner, leaving nothing to chance, while Ariane keeps her thoughts and emotions to herself, almost like a silent screen siren, where the stark contrast between them expresses itself in underlying emotional turbulence.  The old-fashioned décor in Simon’s apartment, with its imposing antique furniture, heavy draperies, and multiple doorways, suggests a wealth of space, while the aesthetic sumptuousness and perfectly framed compositions recall Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), another film that famously explores the structure of memory through a metaphor of grandiose architecture, as the empty corridors and closed rooms of the apartment come to represent the internal landscape of Simon’s fixation, an expression of his own captivity.  Whenever they go out, they’re always alone, finding themselves living in a vacuum, as the sidewalks and streets are strangely empty, where the surrounding population may as well not exist.  Known for portraying unconventional sexual relationships, a precise form is always present with Akerman, and just the way the film unravels reveals a relationship fraught with tension, with Simon continually tightening the noose, increasing the pressure in wanting to learn more and more, where he is never satisfied, as it’s not sex but her very soul that he desires, needing every secret exposed, as only then can he maintain his dominance.  Much of this film plays out in his own mind, as he verbalizes what transpires internally, where he needs to speak the words for them to resonate, while Ariane is his submissive accomplice, yet her unspoken thoughts and desires remain a complete mystery to him, and instead of being enthralled by the challenge, he is completely undone by what he cannot comprehend, feeling stymied by the walls of an invisibly perceived resistance that he finds overwhelming.  Simon’s adventure into the Bois de Boulogne red-light district accentuates the obsession, as he’s searching for someone like Ariane, not only in looks but with her same passive demeanor, someone he can control sexually, but he’s disappointed in his efforts, while he also awkwardly interrogates two young lesbian actresses (Bérénice Bejo and Anna Mouglalis), hoping to learn some of Ariane’s secrets, yet his singleminded takeaway is startlingly naïve in its chauvinistic arrogance.  A radical deconstruction of self, time, and space, there are compulsively repetitive motifs that only inflame the jealous lover’s suspicions, like chasing her in his car around the chic fashionable districts of Paris, being caught in a labyrinth, walking around in circles, unable to find his way out, with the camera using slow tracking shots to meticulously follow the time it takes to move step by step, forcing viewers to feel the passage of time, or continually peppering her friends with questions, hoping to penetrate her mysterious interior realms, but rather than add light to his dilemma, he ends up feeling paralyzed, remaining stuck in an unresolved predicament.  The more he spies on her, the less he knows, ultimately losing himself in the process and drowning in his own pathetic ineptitude.  Unable to cope with uncertainty, he is the exact opposite of the more adaptable Ariane, an opaque presence who just goes with the flow, not letting anything really bother her.  While his rigidly controlled behavior is the very picture of obsession, caught in the prison of his own jealousy, it is the male rather than the female protagonist who is the real captive, as he cannot escape his own debilitating insecurities, which replace his anxiety about writing.  By the end, the morose musical soundtrack from Rachmaninoff - The Isle of the Dead, Op.29 - Vladimir Ashkenazy - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra YouTube (21:10) adds such a pensive tone, creating an intimate yet dark space, where the final sequence explores all the possibilities of night, with the sea devoured by an inky blackness, becoming a dance of death through the light reflected on the water. 

LECTURE & FILM: Das Kino von Chantal Akerman // LA CAPTIVE (2000)  Lecture by co-writer Eric de Kuyper at DFF Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (in English except the introduction), January 11, 2018, YouTube (1:37:44)