Elizabeth: A Portrait in Parts film review – an elegant tribute to the Queen

Directed by the late Roger Michell, this documentary is ‘insightful, mischievous and assembled with panache’

Juliette Binoche spent years trying to persuade the French investigative journalist Florence Aubenas to sell her the rights to her bestselling book Le Quai de Ouistreham. Aubenas finally acquiesced, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard, and the result is this moving film, in which Binoche stars as Marianne, a writer from Paris who takes a job as a cleaner in the town of Caen, in Normandy, in order to expose the grim realities of life for the low-paid. Along the way, she befriends a “stroppy single mum and ferry worker” (Hélène Lambert), who senses “something fishy” about the attractive new arrival in their midst. Binoche gives a “career-best, vanity-free performance”, and though the title may be “forgettable”, the film is “anything but”.

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