The Better Life

Parisian journalist Anne (Juliette Binoche) actually has everything one could want for a contented life. She lives in a smart apartment with her husband and two sons, and her job is working for a successful Parisian magazine. And yet Anne is not really happy. Just how much she has to question her marriage and her position within the family, however, only becomes clear to her when she interviews two young women while researching an article about female students who have to finance their education through prostitution. Instead of the expected despair and descriptions of frustrating misery, Anne encounters self-confidence and ambition in the Polish Alicja (Joanna Kulig) and the French Charlotte (Anaїs Demoustier), with which the students master even extremely humiliating situations. Through the extensive, very frank conversations, Anne gains a new perspective not only on the girls' situation, but also on her own desires for a better life...

The Better Life may be a very good, haunting drama. However, I personally had one very big problem with the film. This was not that, as a man, I felt that the men in the film were portrayed too negatively. Admittedly, I do feel that director Malgoska Szumowska made it a little too easy on herself when drawing the male characters, that she used stereotypes that were too hackneyed and one-sided. But even if this is a bit annoying, it's not really annoying. What I find much worse is that Szumowska takes a very important topic to tell what is actually an uninteresting story. Because the fact that young female students have to earn their living with prostitution is not the actual topic of the film, even if the scenes describing this subplot are of course the ones most likely to be talked about due to their partly shocking content. No, it's really about an affluent middle-class woman unhappy with her life who, through her conversations with two young prostitutes/students, questions her own life, dreams, fears and desires.

What really bothers me about this is that it almost seems that the director doesn't really seem to care about the two supporting characters. Their less than pleasant fate is good enough to make for some shocking scenes. But whenever it comes to the really important or interesting questions, the movie retreats from the lives of the two girls, preferring to spend minutes watching Anne trying to close the fridge door or stirring a pot while lost in thought. The fact that this also puts Binoche in the foreground as an actress is also a little annoying. Because while she is allowed to look into the camera in long shots, lost in thought, or to fool around hysterically drunk in another shot that is far too long, Anaїs Demoustier as Charlotte has to let herself be raped with a bottle and Joanna Kulig as Alicja has to let herself pee all over herself. What exactly such moments make of the young women is more or less kept quiet. And that's exactly why we get the feeling that the rather graphic depiction of such scenes only serves to shock and that it's not really about the fate of the (supporting) characters. And that would mean that the film does exactly what the men in the film are accused of doing: exploiting the young women.

Acknowledged, this is perhaps a somewhat exaggerated view now. But I do feel that the film makes some glaring mistakes and loses any pretensions it might have had as a result. Since it is first and foremost Anna's story, there would have been no need for the unvarnished and shocking images from the prostitution business. If it was meant to be the story of all three women, then many of the long takes on Anna's life should have been cut to focus on how the young female students change through their work. The fact that they are strong and will put up with humiliation and pain to achieve their goals is made clear, as is the fact that they do not let their fate slip away. But that their work changes them, that it will shape their lives, should be clear to every viewer. And the fact that this isn't worked out at all here, but instead the focus is rather put on a rather uninteresting story in comparison, is just annoying. So kudos from me to Joanna Kulig and Anaїs Demoustier for their brave and extremely strong performances. However, the fact that director Malgoska Szumowska has relegated these performances to mere sideshows is a shortcoming that makes this film not really recommendable for me.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp