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 Taste of Things (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)

 

Director Trân Anh Hùng

Trân with Dennis Lim at Film at Lincoln Center

Trân with Benoît Magimel

Trân with Juliette Binoche

culinary consultant Pierre Gagnaire

THE TASTE OF THINGS (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)            B                                        aka: The Pot-au-Feu                                                                                                                    France  Belgium  (135 mi)  2023  d: Trân Anh Hùng

The discovery of a new dish brings more joy to humanity than the discovery of a new star.        — Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel)

Winner of the Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival 2023, this deceptively simple film has little actual drama, chosen to represent France at the Oscars for Best International Film, passing over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute) (2023).  From the maker of THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN (2000), and Norwegian Wood (2010), Trân is a Vietnamese-born French filmmaker proficient in Vietnamese, French, and English languages, admittedly influenced by Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Mizoguchi.  His transcendent yet often ambiguous films are languid sensual experiences, offering a feeling as if the camera is floating on air, providing opulent textures in every frame, often providing a myriad of simultaneous events with multiple character relationships, showing a uniform theme of strong Asian cultural values, including family respect, bonding, and commitment.  Recalling works like Gabriel Axel’s BABETTE’S FEAST (1987) and Ang Lee’s EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (1994), this is an impassioned ode to gastronomy mixed with philosophical overtones set in France during the Belle Époque era of the 1880’s, where the gluttonous indulgence on display is utterly flabbergasting, where less than .01% of the world’s population since the dawn of time has ever eaten like this, something more commonly associated with the hedonistic indulgence of Nero before the fall of Rome, a stark contrast from the naturally healthy cuisine in Vietnam, with minimal use of fats or oils, where the rich butter-saturated excess is certainly not healthy and is what we commonly think leads to heart disease.  The one-note aspect of non-stop cooking in the kitchen and then taking such extreme pleasure in the taste afterwards is so exaggerated to the extreme that at times it can feel absurdly laughable, but that is not the director’s intentions, as this is a masterclass on the culinary art of taste and bourgeois refinement, where it’s basically an elaborately staged two-person play revolving exclusively around food, with the intermingling of two like-minded, creative souls, establishing a slow rhythm in the opening half hour, utilizing an immersive, near wordless restraint that follows the main protagonists as they skillfully move around the kitchen without all that cooking gadgetry used today, seen hovering over the stove, adding ingredients, tasting, issuing precise instructions, with the director creating a culinary ballet in motion. The carefully chosen sound design includes birds, insects, and farm animals that are heard through open windows, but never seen, with no accompanying music, only a few bars of Bellini’s Casta Diva at the opening while a Jules Massenet theme closes the film leading into the final credits.  The authenticity of the subject matter required a Michelin-winning chef, Pierre Gagnaire, as a culinary consultant, along with his chef Michel Nave preparing all the food used on the set, and actually appears in one scene rattling off the meticulously detailed twenty course menu for a wealthy Eurasian Prince that is so grandiose that it required 8-hours to consume.  Adapted from the early 20th century gastromic novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet (The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet) by Swiss writer Marcel Rouff, one of the founding members of the Académie des gastronomes in 1928, which unfolds in the 1830’s referencing Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a pioneering writer of gastronomic studies and French lawyer who briefly fled to the U.S. to survive the aftermath the French Revolution, where the enduring popularity of the book is clear, as it went through 50 French editions between 1924 and 2010, where Rouff was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur), France’s highest civilian honor.  But French cuisine was largely established by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, known simply as Talleyrand, who became a leading member of the revolution, and Napoleon’s chief diplomat, where his meals were created by pâtissier Marie-Antoine Carême (Marie Antoine Careme - The First Celebrity Chef), the leading French chef of the early 19th century, who created the best cuisine possible for the influx of ambassadors from around the world.   

Most of the film takes place in the idyllic setting of a spacious 19th century chateau home kitchen that belongs to world-class gastronome and wealthy restaurateur Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), shot at the Château du Raguin (château du Raguin - Chateau fort et Manoir) in the Maine-et-Loire region of western France, with its stone walls, wood burning stove ovens, copper pots, extensive vegetable and herb gardens, and fields of livestock, overseen by Eugénie (Juliette Binoche, initially rejecting the role until it was expanded from a script rewritten with her in mind), an accomplished gourmet cook who’s able to bring his ambitious menus to life.  Much of what we see, and more importantly the way we see it, is through her eyes.  She is the behind-the-scenes force that orchestrates everything that transpires, seen waltzing around the stoves with stunning confidence and finesse, with so many things happening simultaneously.  And that’s pretty much it, and while Magimel and Binoche are exquisite throughout (in real life they have a child together, Hana, who reportedly cried at seeing this film bringing her parents back together), watching people cook for over two hours may not appeal to any but the most passionate food lovers, but what stands out isn’t so much what is being filmed, but the way that it is presented.  Like Trân’s other films, the utterly luxurious, choreographed elegance of Jonathan Ricquebourg’s luminous cinematography is the defining quality of the film, mostly shot on 35mm, and is nothing less than spectacular, along the lines of Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975) or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), taking full advantage of natural light and the bucolic countryside, mostly shot with roving handheld cameras that move with immaculate precision around the room, soaking in the meticulous preparation of food with loving adoration, with a candlelight dinner shot at the Château de Brissac, while another was shot alongside a shimmering moonlit lake.  The sensual bliss of how food is presented mirrors the romanticized relationship happening onscreen, both in body and spirit, as Eugénie has worked for Dodin for the last 20 years, known as “the Napoleon of culinary art,” and by turning the preparation of food into a kind of religious experience, it becomes their means of communicating, where cooking together is their prayerful dialogue, proof of how their relationship has evolved.  By now they’re able to complete each other’s thoughts in the kitchen, as their intimate working relationship with food is matched by his complete devotion to her, as he is in awe of what she can produce in the kitchen.  They also have a long-standing sexual attraction, living in separate quarters in the chateau where she is happy with the way things are, enjoying the teasing aspect of having the luxury of leaving her door opened or locked at night, which gives her the kind of freedom and control she thrives upon, a practice he has grown to accept.  Otherwise, this is a man’s world, as Dodin’s guests are exclusively male, a chauvinistic Greek chorus collection of some of the town’s most successful men, pillars of the community so to speak, always dressed in black, who share a common epicurean passion for the sheer delights of eating gourmet food, where the devotion these men express at the table, accompanied by only the finest French wines, exceeds the attention any of them ever show to the women in their lives, who are never seen, of course, as they prioritize food over anything else.  Accordingly, Eugénie, who never appears in the dining room, preferring to eat in the kitchen with the servants, has come to represent a kind of demigod in their eyes.  In this film, the sensual pleasure of food becomes linked to erotic passion, reminiscent of the culinary history of Afro-Brazilian Bahia culture on display in Hector Babenco’s sex farce Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976).  The film is dedicated to Trân’s wife, Trân Nu Yên-Khê, who not only starred in his first three films but also worked as an art director and costume designer for this film. 

As sublimely gorgeous as this film is to look at, given an impressionistic style of classical painting, this is as much about obsession as anything else, where there’s an indulgence factor that is disturbing, as this may be one of the unhealthiest films ever to grace the screen (vegetarians beware), setting a terrible example, and to simply overlook that is at one’s own peril.  Dodin confesses “it takes culture and a good memory to shape one’s taste,” yet one wonders why this extreme degree of cultural fascination is so representative of French culture, as so few can ever experience food on this level, or would ever want to, as it’s not much different than extreme sports, like skiing off a mountain, swimming the English Channel, or mountain climbing without ropes, where it’s all about the untainted purity of the experience.  Working alongside Eugénie in the kitchen are two dedicated young assistants, the ever faithful maid/sous chef Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and her child prodigy young niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), turning the room into a quiet and reflective sanctuary, pausing to season and taste along the way, with Dodin himself making regular appearances to surgically cut and prepare various fish, meats, and vegetables, all freshly acquired, combining exact proportions of spices, where the art of cooking is not for the faint of heart, but the result of meticulous measurements of exact science that produce such rare results, like a pot-au-feu, vol-au-vent, and an omelette norvégienne (baked Alaska), as these guests have such carefully trained palettes that anything less than extraordinary would immediately be recognized as lacking heart and soul.  It is a world of riches and earthly delights, the historical interest of kings and queens, as only they had the leisure time and unlimited finances for living such a lavish lifestyle to truly appreciate such delicacies that take all day to prepare, celebrating Puligny Montrachet and Chambolle Musigny as the most sublime white and red burgundies on earth, where Marie Antoinette, the last queen prior to the French Revolution, grew extremely unpopular with the public and was guillotined for living in such decadence.  The royal family would be delighted that such exaggerated culinary interest would suddenly recapture the interest of the nation some two hundred years later, as if exonerated from their crimes.  Despite years of playing coy, Eugénie finally agrees to Dodin’s marriage proposal, apparently won over by an elaborate meal he prepares especially for her, not allowing her to set foot in the kitchen, then watching her consume every morsel with great anticipation, including champagne pulled from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, literally sweeping her off her feet, where the individualism of their separate worlds are suddenly combined, with the marital celebration capturing the picturesque beauty of a Renoir painting, where friends are gathered around a long table situated alongside a lake for lunch, with the couple seen afterwards walking through a sun-kissed meadow.  But after a series of unexplained fainting spells, she mysteriously disappears from view, leaving a void not only in his life but the audience as well, suggesting there is, like a meal one consumes, an ephemeral nature to all of this, as the intensity quickly dissipates with Binoche out of the kitchen, creating an uneven aftermath that simply lags, unable to capture the same fascination without her, as she is the engine that drives the picture.  While she is as essential as Sonia Braga is to DOÑA FLOR, this film leaves plenty of unanswered questions and is likely to appeal only to the most ardent culinary followers or those devoted arthouse cinephiles who will be mesmerized by the hypnotic beauty in every frame, concluding with that lyrical Massenet piano theme, Méditation from the opera Thaïs, Meditation from Thaïs for piano (Andrew von Oeyen) filmed in ... YouTube (5:18).