Film Review | Coming Clean in ‘Between Two Worlds’

On some basic level, the film Between Two Worlds might be distinguished as the film in which famed French actress Juliette Binoche is seen wielding mops, making beds (in cruelly record time), and cleaning toilets. But a critical backstory lends all-important context to her character, Marianne: She is on an undercover mission, as a self-embedded journalist learning the nitty-gritty life of the janitorial world.

She is straddling the film title’s “two worlds” in question, between the comfortable life of a writer on a surreptitious research adventure and the “fake person” identity she adopts in the line of duty and very much on-the-job.

Filmmaker, novelist, and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrère created this intriguing socioeconomic bridging tale, loosely based on Florence Aubenas’s autobiographical book The Night Cleaner. Aubenas also donned the garb and identity of the invisible, after- and between-hours life of cleaning personnel, a job description euphemistically called “maintenance agent” by the employment agency Marianne first encounters.