Regardless of the profession that Emmanuel Carrère exercises, the themes of lies and camouflaged or usurped identity recur like leitmotivs in his universe. This is not the only element that contributes to its success, but it is a distinctive mark that gives each of its projects a particular touch, capable of offering different variations in sometimes strange settings.
It was said and said again: Ouistreham was first born from a deep desire of Juliette Binoche to bring to the screen the story of an infiltration (Ouistreham wharf, published in 2010), that of the journalist Florence Aubenas in the middle of the laborious, impoverished and mostly female staff of housekeeping in the north of France. We first imagined the novelist Carrère in a role in which he excelled, that of screenwriter, a role he often occupied for his own books (The snow class, All our desires, The adversary), while his career as a filmmaker appears modest (The moustache). But the territory raked by Aubenas turned out to be perfect for him, who likes to scratch under social veneer and unmask those who delight in fooling others — for fun or for survival instinct.
The motivations of Marianne Winckler (Binoche, between pale face, sincere tears and contagious bursts of laughter) appear clear when she is unmasked by a civil servant who recognized the writer behind this “false person”, this housewife character now without husband and without status: making these invisible workers visible. For this, she has temporarily drawn a line under her bourgeois and Parisian life, living modestly in the midst of those whose modest existence and exhausting work with atypical hours she wants to bear witness to.
Because those whom the French used to call “surface technicians” – we no longer say that, according to the same official… – carry out this hard work when the other workers are absent or asleep. While these galley slaves of the neoliberal era sleep standing up under the weight of the infernal speeds (for example, in 90 minutes, it is necessary to make 60 cabin beds on a ferry) and live on poverty wages, Marianne, also the two feet in shit, notes his observations, scrutinizes his comrades in misfortune with discretion and sometimes invites them to shake off their alienating routine.
However, in front of these women (amazing non-professional actresses) with whom she weaves increasingly strong ties, including Chrystèle (Hélène Lambert), a single mother of three children on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a feeling of imposture invades Marianne. She also fears being betrayed by her origins, or unable to translate the miseries of a social class from which she can escape at any time. This tension fascinates Emmanuel Carrère, who finds there a deep resonance weaving all his work, a reflection on the sincerity of the artist when describing reality, multiple and fragmentary according to the point of view where one places oneself.
InOuistreham, Carrère dissects the simple and exhausting daily life of workers entangled in a system whose cogs quickly crush them. But we are far from the asceticism of the Bruno Dumont of the 1990s (The life of Jesus, humanity) or the aesthetic radicalism of the Dardenne brothers, who also ended up convincing stars to dive into the world of odd jobs and great injustices (Marion Cotillard in Two days, one night).
In the process of adaptation, replacing the journalist as the vibrant heart of the story with a writer accentuates the ethical dimension of this infiltration, a method better known in the media than in the literary world. In this dynamic, many people observed feel cheated by this quest for truth under cover of anonymity, the good intentions of some not necessarily alleviating the injustices suffered by others. Now, with its accents of truth, Ouistreham exposes the delicate nature of the exercise and, in a bittersweet conclusion, testifies to its limits.
Emmanuel Carrère in no way upsets the imperatives of the world of precarious work, but he reveals its darkness and illuminates the nobility of those who are prisoners of it.