Juliette Binoche stars as an author who, inspired by George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, goes undercover as a cleaning lady in the northern French port of Caen to research a book on job insecurity and social precariousness. Desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security.