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| (Sundance Selects)
The
Dardenne Brothers seem to, every few years or so, remind us of what “realism”
really looks like. Their latest, Two
Days, One Night, is exceptionally humane and gentle, even among other works
within their filmography. But it’s the very opposite of small, or minor – call
it the most un-epic epic of the year. Devoid of musical composition or visual
trickery, the movie is wholly reliant on narrative and character. And that’s
exactly how it should be – Two Days, One
Night manages to structure the year’s most significant cinematic narrative
around a character that emerges as a legitimate modern-day heroine.
Marion
Cotillard, the rare “name” to appear in a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,
stars as Sandra, an employee at a solar panel production company. She’s getting
fired – her co-workers voted to let her go in order to keep their bonuses of
one thousand Euros. This is the movie’s premise: bare-bones, with a lot of
details left blank to be filled in. After discovering that supervisor Jean-Marc
had intimidated certain co-workers into letting her go, Sandra convinces her boss
to allow a re-vote. She has one weekend – two days, one night – to convince a
majority of her fellow employees to forgo bonuses, and keep her in the company.
The
Dardennes possess the uncanny ability to detail a character and a predicament with
complete naturalism. Through various conversations, we learn of Sandra’s battle
with depression, and thus her recent medical leave. We see her popping Xanax,
reluctantly closing the bottle after taking a single pill. And after sensing a
casual distance between Sandra and her supportive husband Manu (Fabrizio
Rongione), her random blurting out of “I know we’re going to split up” doesn’t
jar, or feel out-of-place – it fits squarely into the film’s template, and
helps to softly and yet comprehensively sketch out this person, this marriage
and this world. Thus, as we come to more complexly identify Sandra, we witness
her wrestling with very recognizable and difficult realities – as always, the
Dardennes’ eye is most contemporary, from the swallowing of the pills to the lack
of security within one’s employment.
Truthfully,
the movie’s quality could be predicted from the title page – the
thematically-rich logline, the versatile leading actress, the lauded
filmmakers. And Two Days, One Night
does not disappoint – within each encounter, between Sandra and a co-worker, is
a mightily complex understanding of human nature. Within Sandra’s very proposition
– “my job, or your bonus” – is an awkward mix of unavoidable entitlement, deep
humility and numerable unknowables. Cotillard finds a way to fit every
sensation in, without a word – a stunted walk, a quivering mouth, a quiet and
shaky voice. She’s practically bleeding Sandra’s shame, and ably transfers her
profound anxiety – Will the co-worker be sympathetic? Do they need the bonus to
stay afloat? Is Sandra’s asking more selfish than their refusal to support her?
– to the audience. It’d be easy for the film to settle into an
easily-digestible, if redundant, groove. But the approach from the Dardennes
and Cotillard is rigorous. Each interaction works as a mini morality play, in
which various actors of different backgrounds, different levels of generosity
and different levels of entitlement come into Sandra’s orbit. They are tasked
to weigh materialism and selfishness – in the purest sense of the word – against
altruism and selflessness. And yet the movie resists, at every turn, to posit right
and wrong. The great risk of the film is its fashioning of Sandra’s capacity
for decency as unmalleable. That the movie is able to leave sympathetic those
that shut the door in Sandra’s face is, frankly, a remarkable achievement.
The
Dardennes bring along their usual (lack of) flourish. There’s no musical
underscore, no special lighting or strikingly-cinematic approach. The lack of
any emotional cue whatsoever, beyond Cotillard’s magnetic and
startlingly-expressive performance, does Two
Days, One Night a great service, as it maintains a thoughtful, anticipatory
ambiguity throughout. And in examining the film more broadly, the Dardennes’ work
with the camera fits especially well considering Two Days’ meticulous structure. The camera doesn’t cut much – most of these one-on-ones go on for a single take, and it’s not obvious or especially-stylistic like a Birdman. These scenes simply pierce in
their realism, progressing in documentary-like fashion as characters walk in
and out of frame, as the camera captures momentary facial transformations, as pleas
that don’t go Sandra’s way go on without a break, unsparingly confronting her
humiliation and shame. It’s through this approach that Two Days, One Night stays so emotionally involving and varied
throughout; the camera allows us to tour a working-class Belgian neighborhood,
and peer into the lives of a half-dozen or so family-men and -women as they grapple
with their inner-truths, and their capacity for goodness.
In
a sense, the movie is indeed about class conflict and comfort, and successfully
rattles for the way it so bluntly identifies everything from depression to
unemployment to cruelty. But the movie is most significant for what it calls
for, what it claims – graciousness, humility and self-worth. Cotillard takes
Sandra on such a thorough emotional journey, ever-so-slightly altering her walk
and her smile as the weekend, of such ups and downs, rolls along. You sense her
reclaiming herself. Early, Sandra verbalizes where her aching sadness is coming
from: her co-workers voted to have her let go, as if she were “invisible.” And
through each encounter, however difficult or fruitless, she’s able to connect
with people, hear their stories, understand them, take a breath, and move on.
As the film’s ending indicates, the job loss is not the end of the world:
family life will be difficult, and money will be tight, but she has the ability
to move on in a way some of her co-workers would not. What’s inescapable is the
sense of dissipating self-worth, of mattering and of external presence. Two Days, One Night is intimate and raw in
the way it depicts one person’s internal struggle, and yet its exterior is
sweeping – the Dardennes appear to be making a grand plea for humanity, with
Sandra in desperate search of it.
Two Days, One Night
presents thorny – sometimes, impossibly thorny – moral questions, and its
intellect is distinctive in that way. It situates genuine, inescapable conflict
in settings that, put simply, feel like real life. And the film achieves a genuinely
uplifting spirit not for merely designating appropriate consequences to the
moral and the amoral. There are no answers there – a choice is often never that
simple, with a “right” and a “wrong” one. Rather, this movie earns every
emotion through an understanding of people as imperfect and yet (mostly)
decent. With their newest film, the Dardennes reach levels of unexpected
vitality and power. Two Days, One Night
is, bracingly, a movie of our time: in the era of mass structural unemployment,
prescription drug addictions and record-high divorce rates, this kind of call to
humility and to a little humanity lands as essential artistic expression.
Grade: A
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