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Emmanuel Carrére’s Between Two Worlds is a loose adaptation of Florence Aubenas’s The Night Cleaner, an autobiographical exposé of France’s gig economy. While the book primarily documents the fatiguing, baldly exploitative labor of cleaning up after others, the film places its emphasis more on the interpersonal dramas between the women to whom such labor disproportionately falls. It takes things a step further by exploring the knock-on effects of undercover investigative journalism on those same relationships.

Between Two Worlds follows Marianne Winkler (Juliette Binoche), a recently divorced homemaker who arrives in the port city of Caen and finds herself thrust into job market for the first time. An employment agency funnels her into the “industry of the future” as a “maintenance agent”—a euphemism so transparent that it further dehumanizes what it’s meant to humanize. After training, she cobbles together cleaning gigs and, in the process, befriends...

The nonfiction book that inspired the Juliette Binoche movie “Between Two Worlds” resulted from nearly six months of undercover reporting by Florence Aubenas. The respected French journalist wanted to understand how roughly one-eighth of the country’s work force — those who rely on non-contract jobs — got by during the recent economic crisis. To observe the situation firsthand, Aubenas moved to the coast, presented herself at employment centers, and tried to get hired, taking practically any gig that was offered — which wasn’t much, and hardly enough to survive on. In the end, she wound up cleaning the ferry out of Ouistreham, describing the experience and those she observed in her book “The Night Cleaner.”

Now, were someone to make a movie of that book, they would almost certainly start by removing Aubenas from the picture. As in American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s similar, celebrated eye-opener “Nickel and Dimed,” the writer...

Curzon has acquired the U.K. and Ireland rights to “Between Two Worlds,” which is the opening film of the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar in Cannes. The film, directed by Emmanuel Carrère, stars Juliette Binoche. France TV Distribution, which is handling world sales on the film, has allowed Variety to debut the film’s first trailer.

The film, which is loosely adapted by Carrère and Hélène Devynck from the book “The Night Cleaner” by undercover journalist Florence Aubenas, centers on Marianne Winckler, a well-known author, who goes to live in Northern France to research for her new book on the subject of job insecurity. Without revealing her true identity, she gets hired as a cleaner, working with a group of other women. In this new role, she experiences financial instability and social invisibility first-hand. But she also discovers mutual assistance and solidarity, strong bonds shared by these behind-the-scenes working women.

Variety...