Who Do You Think I Am?

This is the latest Juliette Binoche film set in social media and the fantasy relationships it can generate.

Juliette Binoche plays Clare Milaud, a fifty something professor of French literature.

After her husband leaves her for a younger woman and her lover Ludo rejects her, she tries a new strategy.

She goes on social media under the new identity of Ciara, a fit 24 year old girl, seeking to attract Ludo’s young assistant Alex (Francois Civil).

Much of the narrative is explained in Milaud’s sessions with her psychiatrist Dr Catherine Boormans (Nicole Garcia).

This is a clever device well used in the Sopranos in the sessions with James Gandolfini and Lorriane Branco.

The psychiatrist asks the right questions and unravels the deceit but there is also the fascination of an asymmetric relationship.

What does Dr. Boormans really think of Clare?

Is she neurotically self-obsessed or is she turned on by a middle aged woman experimenting and enjoying sex through social media? Like many questions in this film it is left unanswered and this is typical of a French film.

The acting is of high standard, the film explores fantasy, reality, sexuality, deceit through the prism of social media in a way that American movies does not and is more sexually explicit than an British film.

Yet it has many longeurs.

I downloaded it from Curzon Cinema. In the course of watching I had a meal and I must admit in the drawn-out final 20 minutes, when the real Clare has a relationship with Alex – or is that her imagination? – I looked at my mobile for emails more than once.

I probably would have enjoyed it more in the cinema where you are more obliged to watch, or possibly the second time around.