“I feel like a beggar, like I’ve come to take their money.”
Written & Directed by: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Catherin Salee
The H-Bomb: After taking an extended sick leave for depression, Sandra (Cotillard) is ready to return to her job when she finds out that her co-workers have taken a vote; accept a sizable bonus, or keep Sandra on. A majority of her co-workers voted to take the bonus, and Sandra is laid off.
However, it’s been discovered that a manager might have influenced the vote against her, so a new one will be held on Monday. This gives Sandra the weekend to track down her various colleagues, and ask them to vote in her favor, as she has two children, and really needs the job. She seems to get on fine with most of her co-workers, and they certainly would like to have her back, however, a number of them have families and financial woes of their own, and are counting on that bonus to help them get by.
Two Days, One Night (or Deux jours, une nuit, if you want to be all fancy), a 2014 Belgian export and Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, is a simple story about the most complex of topics, human nature. If we put ourselves in the place of one of Sandra’s co-workers, we would all like to think that we would do the “right thing,” by being selfless and voting to give Sandra her job back. What we would actually do, if put in that situation, is probably vote for our own self-interests, and take the bonus.
In many, if not most cases, voting for the bonus would be the “right thing” to do, as we all have bills and rent and kids we want to put through college. Of course, the right thing, in this situation, as in most, is entirely relative. The Dardenne Brothers, who bring to their latest film the same brand of no bullshit realism they brought to such pictures as L’enfant (2005) and The Kid with a Bike (2011), have us backing Sandra all the way, as events unfold entirely from her point of view, and it’s her plight we ultimately become invested in.
Portrayed by a de-glammed (but still fucking gorgeous) Marion Cotillard, in an Oscar-nominated performance, Sandra is a woman of quiet dignity, whose resolve is constantly tested, as her quest to save her job becomes increasingly desperate and frustrating. It’s a quest that is often noticeably repetitious, and that will undoubtedly put off some. However, the repetition of her going to colleague after colleague, and asking the same favor over and over, is by design, to show that each time it becomes a bit more difficult. Every rejection is a demoralizing blow for Sandra. Yet she soldiers on…
Two Days, One Night is, as you may have guessed, not exactly upbeat, crowd-pleasing fare, nor is it in any way overly downbeat or melodramatic. Instead, it’s a down-to-earth film about real world people dealing with real world problems. Some, undoubtedly, will find it dull, because absolutely nothing is sensationalized in the movie’s almost documentary-like approach. Cotillard is an international star, yet she totally disappears into the role of an ordinary woman fighting an uphill, and seemingly unwinnable battle.
It’s her naturalistic-yet-wrenching performance that ultimately makes Two Days, One Night the moving, emotional tour-de-force that it is. Again, its subdued, dare I say European, tone is not for everyone, but those who can appreciate well acted, human stories, and who don’t mind subtitles, of course, will find much to savor here.
