Juliette Binoche as Claire in Who You Think I Am (photograph via Palace Films)

Typical French literary themes of ageing, death, and desire (Baudelaire is cited, as is Duras and Laclos) are briefly explored through the device of making Claire a professor of French literature. However, Claire is no plaster saint: she practises what she preaches to a certain extent and sets the rest down in the form of a novel. This is one of the interesting, albeit hardly original, facets of Nebbou’s film: the intermingling of life and art, of fantasy and reality. To say more would be saying too much: this is a film that twists and turns almost from the outset.

Binoche is excellent as the unhinged professor; the character of Claire is both convincing and pathetic (in the nineteenth-century sense of the word). She captures well the ambiguity of the ‘invisible’ fifty-something woman who is not ready to give up on sex or even love. Nebbou questions our norms and expectations of what is appropriate and inappropriate for a woman Claire’s age. This leads to some uncomfortable moments – uncomfortable precisely because of these norms and expectations. The scene where an intoxicated Claire dances by herself at a party for those over fifty as though she is a twenty-something at a club, and later masturbates in the front seat of her car, are reminiscent of the novels of Michel Houellebecq and make for awkward viewing. However, Binoche also provides the lighter moments in the film, of which, admittedly, there are few.

The supporting cast is strong. François Civil plays Alex, a character we at first despise and then come to feel for as the extent of Claire’s ruse becomes apparent. Nicole Garcia is solid as the psychoanalyst who struggles with objectivity the more she recognises herself in Claire. The film is beautifully shot, with some fine cinematic moments: the scenes shot on the cliffs of Étretat on the north coast of France and at the Centre Pompidou are both breathtaking and deeply symbolic of the kind of void Claire is on the verge of plumbing. Paris of the poets is defamiliarised and given a contemporary face suited to the subject matter. We are in New Paris here, the Paris of glass and steel highrise; the lecture hall where Claire delivers her lectures on old French writers glows with laptop screens. Indeed, the film is ostensibly about technology and the way it allows us to establish an identity that is at once part of, and distinct from, reality. Claire mixes it up, creating a portrait of a young woman mature beyond her years and a middle-aged woman with the desires of someone half her age. As Nebbou himself said in an interview: ‘In her own way, Claire rejects the idea of passing time in refusing to renounce her desire. So yes, I do hope that Claire is me, you, all of us.’

Juliette Binoche as Claire and François Civil as Alex in Who You Think I Am (photograph via Palace Films)

What the film does not address is the question of how far one should go in pursuit of one’s desire and the consequences of doing so. Some viewers may balk at the occasionally glib treatment of ‘catfishing’, which can have serious consequences for the victims (including suicide and ongoing mental health issues). At first it seems that Nebbou gets around this by introducing Alex as a rather unlikable accomplice to Ludo’s rejection of Claire. However, as Alex becomes more sympathetic, the seriousness of Claire’s deception begins to become apparent. The consequences of Claire’s actions are dramatised in different ways in the film. While we may never know the ‘real’ outcome of them for Alex, the suggestion is that it is not positive. Interestingly, Nebbou himself was the victim of catfishing while making the film and drew on some of the online dialogue from that experience. What mitigates the morality of the situation is that it is impossible to disentangle fact from fiction; we never really know if Claire is telling the truth in her sessions, nor how far she went with the deception. One thing we do know about Claire is that as a narrator she is both narcissistic and unreliable.

Who You Think I Am is an intriguing film, at times profound and moving. It is a well-paced drama-cum-thriller that plays with notions of truth, representation, and identity in our image-saturated, social media-obsessed culture.

Who You Think I Am (Palace Films), directed by Safy Nebbou, 102 minutes. In cinemas August 1.