The Daily Telegraph

Binoche dazzles in catfish thriller

- By Tim Robey

Film

Who You Think I Am

15 cert, 102 min

Dir Safy Nebbou Starring Juliette Binoche, Nicole Garcia, François Civil, Marie-ange Casta, Guillaume Gouix, Charles Berling

Cautionary tales about online dating certainly can’t be put in the escapist category of viewing right now – indeed, with real life put on indefinite hold, keyboard romancing is just about the only type going. The unsettling French drama Who You Think I Am stars Juliette Binoche as a catfish – that’s to say, someone who forges an identity online to lure an unsuspecti­ng catch, using the term popularise­d by the 2010 documentar­y of that name.

The situation is part-experiment, part-revenge. Claire (a top-drawer Binoche) is a literature professor and mother of two in Paris whose husband (Charles Berling) has left her for a younger woman. She’s been seeing a guy called Ludo (Guillaume Gouix), but he’s much more casual about their fling than she is. One night, he pulls the plug, using a couch-surfing friend called

Alex (François Civil) to answer his phone and get rid of her – even though Ludo is clearly audible from the kitchen and the two men are mucking around at her expense.

Put out to pasture by her husband and now gracelessl­y jilted by her rebound fling, Claire cuts a lost and neurotic figure. Facebook-surfing, she finds Alex, and constructs a fake profile – that of a gorgeous 24-year-old, “Clara Antunès” – to grab his attention. She does this by dropping a breadcrumb trail of sly likes, flattering his own image of himself as a profession­al photograph­er, and giving little of herself away.

The initial joke of Safy Nebbou’s film, which is quietly disturbing but also darkly amusing to the end, is how easily Alex is taken in by this ego-flattering mystery woman, who is tantalisin­gly unavailabl­e and therefore all the more attractive. But the deeper pull of the idea is that Clara, as a creation, takes on a life of her own. Claire can sculpt and control her wispy identity up to a point: when Alex is surprised not to find Clara on Instagram, she quickly covers her tracks by claiming she’s a social media refusenik.

But when Alex, excellentl­y played by Civil as an obnoxious romantic with zero self-awareness, presses ever more urgently to meet in person, Claire’s baseline terror of rejection can’t help but infuse the persona she’s spawned. Her panicky demurrals might come from a place of vulnerabil­ity rather than power, but only have the effect of stringing Alex along all the more irresistib­ly.

There are plenty more plot chicanes to follow, as well as some intriguing shifts into Claire’s fantasy life. The conceit Nebbou has imagined with co-writer Julie Peyr allows for elegant musings on the ways we recreate ourselves in any new relationsh­ip, and also on the destabilis­ing part technology plays as a duplicitou­s Cupid creating illusions of intimacy on our screens.

Much of the film’s back-and-forth drama plays out by smartphone and on Claire’s laptop. But the real crux of it is on Binoche’s face, with all of its power to flicker from laughter to despair in a heartbeat. Claire might be one of the most abject specimens she’s ever played, and there’s a kind of illicit thrill about watching Binoche dive so committedl­y into this woman’s damage, drugged by the dopamine hits she gets from the little green light of Alex’s active status.

Claire’s gamble, which becomes a dangerous addiction, is by no means just hers – it’s merely the logical extension of everyone’s best-footforwar­d Tinder profiles. All the age-fudging on apps, the non-updating of selfies, and the implicit dread of being past it have converted our real-life selves into stricken portraits in the attic.

On Curzon Home Cinema

 ??  ?? Fantasy: Juliette Binoche’s Claire builds a fake profile that takes on a life of its own
Fantasy: Juliette Binoche’s Claire builds a fake profile that takes on a life of its own
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