Carrère: “Me and the invisible workers who clean at night”

Lifting the veil on the submerged, on what we read in news pages and between the lines of the lives of (not) illustrious men. Make detail macro with lenses and hall mirror distortions. Diluting one’s voice, including abysses, in the stories and voices of others. This is only a small part of what Emmanuel Carrère did, in literature, after Love I suspect (2005), now returns to directing with Between two worldsopening film of the Directors’ Fortnight a Cannes (in the hall from 7 April with Teodora), presented in Italian preview during the Rendez-Vous festival. Inspired by the French journalist’s investigative novel Florence Aubenasthe journey follows the staging of a writer, played by Juliette Binochewho, to prepare a report on precarious work, does not immediately reveal her identity and is hired to do the cleaning on a ferry which crosses the Channel. As often happens in Carrère’s books (although this is not a literary creature) the story runs on two levels, two levels of reading on the razor’s edge between truth-camouflage. Here what emerges are the real faces of the workers and the raw everyday life experienced firsthand by the French journalist who spent six months on a precarious ferry boat, between underpaid jobs and submerged, invisible identities.

I have read that Juliette Binoche, having dinner with the writer Aubenas every year tries to convince her to think about the film adaptation of the book… And she, why did she say yes?
«Aubenas is the best journalist we have in France at the moment, at first she didn’t want to give up rights to the book but Juliette Binoche was persistent, she absolutely wanted to make the film and when she gets something in her head, she manages to do it. It was Aubenas who suggested my name, I accepted with pleasure. On one condition: that the cast was made up entirely of non-professional actors and actresses, apart from Juliette Binoche ».

One of the key themes of the film is the invisibility of work, which is one of the first specters when it comes to precarious work.
“There are many other badly paid and hard jobs but cleaning is a bit particular because it is practiced in the dark, in companies with public places before workers arrive or after they have left, during night hours that require constant movements and considerable associated costs. If we think about it, the expensive gasoline was also one of the fuses of the Gilets Jaunes a few years ago. It is a profession that cannot be seen. One notices the cleaning only when it is badly done or not done, no one expresses gratitude for whoever is behind it ».

And what does this entail?
«The overload of this profession is invisibility, people are like zombies. In France, a reform has been initiated to ensure that cleaning workers operate in the same time slot as other workers. It is as if the workers were all in the same boat, no more than the illegal immigrants ».

In the film, the dimension of double identity, unmasking is accentuated: why? Did he perhaps look at his way of writing literature and finding the shadows of everyday life?
“True, it is an aspect that does not exist in the book, the protagonist never turns the camera towards her, she does not have an introspective dimension, everything is turned and leaning towards the other. On the other hand, I am also very interested in moods. There is a veneer of lies, something Hitchcockian, something fictitious in the film, one wonders when the mask will fall. I love the night scene, it has something mysterious, almost the protagonist alone with herself felt a sense of threat ».

For Yoga you spoke of autobiography as a mirror of the self, what is direction for you?
«One always expresses something of oneself but cinema implies a greater distance. In Between two worlds Could I possibly identify myself? I think so. When you represent the lives of others, whatever you do, moral questions are universal as are the questions we keep asking ourselves every day. “

On February 24 he was in Moscow when the Russian army invaded Ukraine, he wrote about it in a report / diary released a few days later. What struck you immediately?
“I did not immediately perceive that I was in a war situation but I saw the inhabitants who suddenly found themselves thrown into an absurd and horrible situation: it was their country that started a war without having wanted to:” It is not our war, we would not never attack anyone! ”, said voices around me. Here, too, I thought about the possibility of identification, it would be terrible if my or your country became an aggressor, to find ourselves in a similar situation and not be able to do anything ».

As a connoisseur of the mechanisms of contemporary Russia, did you perceive discontent or anti-Putin demands in those days and after?
“Discontent was perceived but it was impossible to understand to what extent he was representative, who was in favor and who against Putin. No less important, the polls in Russia are driven by government systems and have no reliable value, and those who respond would never openly say that they are against war because it would be a dangerous response in such a context. It is very difficult to understand what the situation really is ».

What can writing do in the face of all this?
“In the field of journalism there are two families, journalists who deal with political analysis and others who tell the impact of reality on ordinary people, I belong to the second category. Circumstances dictated that I was in Moscow, spoke with friends and told what I saw without pretending that it was the thinking of all Russians or without any presumption of sketching sociological or political analyzes. This is what I do, narrate ».

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