Ouistreham

The famous and audacious French writer Emmanuel Carrère once again lives a “love story” with cinema, after a long interregnum (his previous film dates back to 2005, when he adapted his own novel La Moustache). Juliette Binoche plays the central character (establishing an almost alchemical relationship with a group of non-professional actors), a writer who goes undercover and infiltrates the world of cleaning workers to investigate and learn about the reality of precarious employment in French society. Making a free adaptation of the nonfiction book by French journalist Florence Aubenas, Le Quai de Ouistreham (a social chronicle and a denunciation of the unstable and exhausting conditions of this type of work), Carrère turns the protagonist into a writer (bringing her a little closer to his own experience), making the tone less neutral and observational (as a journalist’s would be) and accepting, as postulated by Heisenberg's theorem, that the observer of a phenomenon also affects and changes it, as if nothing observed were fully free from a certain “tyranny” of presence.