And, of course, the issue of whether such journalism is delusional or parasitic is a perfectly valid one. Some may not.ĭespite this unbearably obtuse and self-important emotional finale, there is some eye-opening material about the gig workers’ lives and some nice performances.
Some of her soon-to-be-jettisoned pals will forgive her when they see how important her book is. The real dramatic crisis comes with Aubenas’s awful dilemma when she has to confess to them she has been fibbing all this time, and using their lives as raw material for her book, which she will write as soon as she returns to her wealthy and fashionable life in Paris. What Carrère has done is create a drama in which it is the fictionalised Aubenas who is the centre of an imagined gallery of toughly courageous workers – her new best friends. Perhaps what might have been valuable would have been a documentary fronted by Aubenas herself, about what has and hasn’t been achieved for gig workers in France since her book came out – or, arguably, a Loachian fiction based on the real lives of these workers. The book is in the undercover tradition of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain. The grimmest part of the work is scrubbing lavatories and cleaning cabins on the ferry between Ouistreham and Portsmouth. In it, Aubenas describes her experiences “going undercover” and working in the brutal world of cleaning in Caen in northern France, where desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security. It is adapted from the French nonfiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham from 2010 by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas, published in the UK under the title The Night Cleaner. N ovelist and film-maker Emmanuel Carrère has contrived this earnestly intentioned but naive and supercilious drama about poverty and the gig economy, starring a tearful Juliette Binoche.
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