![]() ![]() ![]() It’s her secret, and we’re the only ones carrying it in the room. Marianne is in fact an undercover writer, preparing a book on precarious working conditions. The drudgery is offset by a tight camaraderie among the workers that’s felt most strongly in a pre-shift party for a colleague who is leaving for another job.īut, before then, we discover that this is not simply a drama about the modern world in the vein of a Ken Loach film or something by Carrère’s compatriot Stéphane Brizé ( The Measure of a Man ). The film throws us into the rhythms and rituals of this work. They arrive at dawn, early enough to see African migrants wandering the port in the half-light. Marianne (Juliette Binoche) sits for an interview with an adviser and learns that her little professional experience after years playing second fiddle to a working husband means that her best bet for finding work is to offer herself up as a cleaner.Ĭhristèle – a force of life who lights up this film whenever she appears – and Marianne will meet again as part of a tight band of workers who spend three shifts a day cleaning the cabins of cross-Channel ferries for the minimum wage. The first fiction feature to be directed by French writer Emmanuel Carrère – well-known in France for his non-fiction – plunges us straight into an I, Daniel Blake-like situation in a job centre in the Normandy port city of Caen: there’s a storm of shouting, frustration and condescension as a young mother, Christèle (Hélène Lambert), confronts a manager over a bureaucratic tangle and refuses to shut up and get to the back of the queue.Īlso in the room is another job seeker, a quieter woman who’s clearly not used to this but is sucking it all in. ![]()
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