Film Review: Who You Think I Am

There’s perhaps a slight familiarity to her character here (she was similarly meek and then fired up in the kinkier Elles, for example), but it doesn’t matter because she’s terrific, and more than a little disquieting as well.

Her Parisian Claire Millaud is a 50-year-old divorced teacher who, frustrated with her on-off, wham-bam relationship with Ludo (Guillaume Gouix), decides to set up a fake Facebook account (and note that the French version of Facebook we see throughout looks most polite too). Calling herself ‘Clara’ and using a fake profile pic of a considerably younger woman, she soon sparks the interest of hunky photographer Alex Chelly (François Civil) and all-too-quickly they’re chatting and flirting.

Distracted by his messages even while giving a lecture on Baudelaire, she doesn’t know what to do when he insists that they meet up, and soon the excuses and lies start and Nebbou’s film takes several cruel turns that make sense given that the original French title – Celle Que Vous Croyez – doesn’t translate to Who You Think I Am but something more like The One You Expect. Claire also seems surprised to discover that those depersonalising social media platforms allow us to say things we never would face-to-face, something she really should have realised in what? 1998? Perhaps bringing up those sullen, phone-addicted sons distracted her?

Trickily recounted as a series of therapy sessions with Claire’s doctor Catherine Bormans (Nicole Garcia), who becomes a key player in the drama herself towards the end, this stumbles a touch into its third act and is at its best when Binoche is the focus. And she delivers a performance of at times genuine anguish, and it is quite disturbing to watch a onetime Oscar-winner truly wail.

Who You Think I Am (MA) is in cinemas from August 1