Two Days, One Night (2014): Cotillard vs The Man

The latest film by the Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, aka the Dardenne brothers, stars Marion Cotillard as a young woman fighting to keep her blue-collar job. While not a perfect movie, Two Days, One Night is interesting, thought-provoking and absolutely worth seeing for Cotillard’s stripped-down, brilliant performance.

This film has already received a load of accolades and awards, including the best actress award for Cotillard from the New York Film Critics Circle, and a nomination for the coveted Palme d’Or award at Cannes.

The Dardennes write, direct and produce small independent films in a uniquely naturalistic way. The experience of a Dardenne movie feels almost like watching a documentary which somehow captures the struggles of ordinary people in real time. Although there is clearly a structure and arc to each story, which you sort-of recognize somewhere along the way, there is no mega-plot (war, jewel heist, political intrigue), no special effects or artifice.  Rather, it’s as if you have just been dropped into a moment, invisible, peering into the lives of these folks.

They do this, in part, by keeping their stories simple and their characters real and human. Working with the cinematographer, Alain Marcoen, they have developed a low key, yet fascinating style, relying on natural light photography, extended takes - often using portable or hand-held cameras, frequent close-ups, and unflinching attention to the inner emotional conflicts and burdens of people facing difficult circumstances.

I suggested that the protagonists of the Dardennes’ pictures are ordinary people. What I meant is that these are not exceptional or especially accomplished, successful people. Rather, they are working class or underclass people who find themselves on the fringe in some way or other. For example, La Promesse [The Promise](1996) is about Igor, a young boy of 15 or so, living in the industrial section of Leige, Belgium [where all the Dardenne movies are shot], who helps his amoral father in the business of providing false documents and undocumented jobs to illegal immigrants (among other rackets), but whose life changes as he becomes intrigued with and then involved in the travails of a young widowed African woman.   L’Enfant [The Baby](2005) is about a young couple, twenty year old Bruno and eighteen year old Sonia, who have been living relatively carefree off of her welfare checks and his petty criminality, but who are forced to grow up – a real struggle in his case – when Sonia gets pregnant and has a baby.  2011’s The Kid With A Bike follows Cyril, a feral, emotionally troubled young boy, abandoned to a foster care center by his father, and his relationship with Samantha, the town hairdresser,  who tries to help by taking him into her home on weekends.  

In each of these works, the Dardenne brothers low-key technique allows us to gradually become acquainted with these characters – their charms  and imperfections, their personalities and aspirations.  The intrigue is that as these folks cope with or struggle against their environment, striving to get where they are going, we watch them change and grow, our sympathies are engaged, and they become real human beings for us.   

Dardennes’ films may be about redemption, forgiveness, personal responsibility, and such like, but they are not generally moralistic or preachy. That all of their films center on proletarian characters trying to make money or get by might suggest a general point of view, and certainly a sympathy for that class. However, Two Days, One Night is more directly polemical than its predecessors.

Sandra (Cotillard), a young wife and mother of two small children, is ready to return to work at a small fabrication factory, after a leave of absence occasioned by a bout of depression; but on the eve of her return, Sandra is informed that she is redundant. The other workers were able to cover for her during her absence. The owner offers to take her back, provided that the majority of his other employees – Sandra’s sixteen former coworkers - agree to give up their annual bonuses; he says he can’t afford to do both.  He is willing to put the issue to a vote; and Sandra has just a weekend to try and persuade her colleagues to let her keep her job.

The movie depicts Sandra’s struggle to do this.  Sandra and her family need the money her job brings in. Her income is a necessity, just to make the house payments. At the urging of her husband, she tries to speak with each and every employee before the vote. As Sandra makes her rounds, it becomes clear that most of her compatriots are in similar economic circumstances to her own.  She understands that asking them to give up a sizeable bonus out of sympathy or solidarity with her plight is a mighty big ask; and it pains her to make it. Further, she is already at a low ebb in the self-esteem department, making her lobbying effort that much more difficult.

The varying perspectives of the other workers get a full airing, and they range from supportive, to

sympathetic but regretful, to callously self-interested. The one thing that stands out is their universal condemnation for the bourgeois boss’s manipulation of the situation, pitting workers against workers. He doesn’t seem to understand, or care about, the importance of the jobs his business provides in the lives of his employees.

The film is not perfect. It suffers from a story that, unlike the earlier films mentioned above, is too straightforward, too uncomplicated. As such it is, perhaps, a bit overlong.  Also, the socioeconomic critique offered by Two Days, One Night is pretty monochromatic in my view.  This is not to say that such a class perspective is not justified, only that the exposition is rather simplistic. Yes, the boss is clearly an ass, but could he afford to hire Sandra back and take a smaller profit; or was the factory so marginal that the boss’s financial concerns were justifiable? Couldn’t Sandra just find another job? We don’t know. Perhaps that’s not the point.

What I do know is that Marion Cotillard is in every scene of this motion picture, and her performance is a thing of beauty. She plays Sandra with a raw, intense vulnerability that makes her wholly believable. Even when the character is acting in frustratingly self-destructive ways, she is sympathetic. This is pure acting without false melodrama, without any embellishment from a musical score, without makeup or fancy wardrobe, without movie-star ego. It is just Cotillard immersing herself in her role and succeeding brilliantly. If you love great acting, Two Days, One Night should be on your must-see list.

Two Days, One Night will be released in the U.S. on December 24, 2014
(In French, with English subtitles)