Ouistreham | A credible social portrait ★★★½

To the theme already covered in the book-investigation that journalist Florence Aubenas published in 2010, Emmanuel Carrère added an additional dimension: that of moral responsibility. How far can one lie to better reveal a truth?

Marc-Andre Lussier
The Press

This dilemma, which sometimes arises in a journalistic or artistic approach, is also at the heart of Ouistrehama fiction freely inspired by the book Ouistreham wharf, in which Florence Aubenas told how she had infiltrated under a false identity in a housekeeping team. She could thus reveal the poor working conditions offered to people who try to survive by accepting odd jobs for starvation wages.

To have a free hand, and to bring a reflection absent from the book, the writer Emmanuel Carrère, who has not filmed anything since The moustache in 2005, changed the name of the protagonist. He also invented a story of sincere and intimate friendship between the latter and a workmate, yet thrown on false foundations at the start.

Within a cast composed mainly of non-professionals recruited in Caen (two characters from Florence Aubenas’ book even play their own roles), Juliette Binoche slips into the shoes of the writer Marianne Winckler. Like the one who inspired the character, Marianne intends to conduct an investigation into precarious work. To do this, she goes to Caen and goes to a recruitment center to get hired under a false identity. She ends up in a housekeeping team – mainly female – whose mandate is to clean the cabins of the ferry at night providing the link between Ouistreham and Portsmouth, on the other side of the Channel.

In doing so, she obviously sees what goes through those (especially those) who, day after day, perform essential work anonymously, without being recognized at their fair value, but discovers there too, what she did not expect, a human solidarity, even a joy of living.

A sense of suspense

Ouistreham thus borrows the appearance of a social film à la Ken Loach, to which is added a notion of suspense. How will these women react the day they learn the true intentions of their workmate? And above all, how will Chrystèle react, having become a very close friend? In the role of the latter, Hélène Lambert, who had never acted before, displays a real temperament of an actress and holds the measure magnificently against Juliette Binoche.

The way in which Emmanuel Carrère approaches the question of ethics sometimes sacrifices a sense of nuance in favor of fiction (the writer finds herself at the heart of an emotional betrayal that she would no doubt have avoided in reality), but Ouistreham has the great merit of exposing, with great authenticity, the lives of these people who are too often invisible in the eyes of society and its political stakes. Despite the star image she conveys, Juliette Binoche, who struggled a lot to make this feature film exist, is also credible from start to finish.

Indoors

Drama

Ouistreham

Emmanuel Carrere

With Juliette Binoche, Hélène Lambert, Léa Carne, Emily Madeleine, Patricia Prieur, Evelyne Porée and Didier Pupin

1:47 a.m.

★★★½