Who You Think I Am review – digital romance is radical and relevant

A woman sits alone, facing a laptop screen. As it illuminates her face with a pale light, her expression remains blank. She’s been left to one side by a lover, frustrated so far into herself that the only way out she sees is to build another life. Physical or virtual? It doesn’t matter – it’s always emotional.

A 50-something woman pretending to be a 24-year-old on Facebook, starting up a relationship with a man in his 20s. It’s the sort of film premise that usually leads to a crucially horrific outcome – schlocky B-movies and nightmare thrillers that sanction the internet as a cursed vacuum, pointing fingers at anyone looking to social media in search of intimacy.

But in practice Safy Nebbou’s Who You Think I Am offers a sensitive portrait of a woman navigating the minefields of her romantic landscape, juggling fears of a ticking clock and the simple yearning to feel tethered to another via whichever means necessary. There’s a joke made early in the film to protagonist Claire (Juliette Binoche) about her being a cougar. She doesn’t entirely deny it, and as the film unfolds it becomes clear that these one-word definers, so often used as threats and insults, matter little when the bigger picture is painted with so many nuances.

As Claire, the inimitable Juliette Binoche proves once more why she occupies such a singular space in our cinematic landscape. The actor gives her character a thousand different shades: grace, fear, patience, charisma, sadness, seduction, desperation. It’s as much in the sugary metamorphoses of her voice as the fluid and sensual body language, communicating the magnetic allure of a woman to an entire gender as much as her own struggle to find satisfaction within herself.

The narrative bends and breaks in unusual places, pushing the limits of credible storytelling within the high-stakes genre without ever veering into delirium. There are flashes of comedy – as Claire circles her children’s school car park a dozen times, trying to calm down her impatient lover on the end of the phone. But there are also many moments conveying serious and intense physical pleasure in small every day occurrences – surprisingly, there are few traditional sex scenes to speak of.

Who You Think I Am exists within a hall of mirrors, refracting lonely and secret desires that are rarely met by anyone, where strangers thinking and wanting the same things walk past each other without realising. The script offers a rich assortment of philosophical questionings on jealousy, contentment, affection and abandonment, delivered with searing candour. “What is love without desire?” Claire asks. We know it’s more complex than that, as her story communicates the urgency of desire but also moves beyond it – conveying how love and companionship relates to our individual assessment of ourselves, and more specifically, how we come to accept our own expiration date.

What makes Who You Think I Am particularly curious is the way it understands a chilling truth that has come to define dating and ghosting and loving and surviving in the modern day. The greatest blessing and most frustrating curse we have? Online, anyone can live forever.

Who You Think I Am is available on Curzon Home Cinema from 10 April.