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This is the rich premise of Two Days, One Night, and the Dardennes Brothers do not disappoint in carrying it through. We’re thrown into an event that feels purposefully unremarkable. This isn’t a survival story in the typical sense – the stakes are high for her family, definitely, but Sandra’s quest to ensure these votes is less about securing the job and more about her own mental recovery. The Dardennes' cinema verité style and sparse script perfectly complement Cotillard’s finely calibrated performance. Her welled eyes on a phone call, her slumped posture, the way she licks an ice cream cone, and her swaying gestures as she sings along to The Doors' "Gloria" are only a few of the intimate details Cotillard imbues her character with, to reveal the deep recesses of Sandra’s soul.
Yet the movie is not a life-or-death
thriller, Cotillard is not giving a big performance; the picaresque
structure doesn't allow us to comprehensively judge each character. We build
our assumptions around few details: one eventually gets the sense that the greater affair
has passed, that Sandra is in the stage of rebuilding rather than unraveling.
The Dardennes avoid cheap sentimentality, centering the conflict on Sandra’s ability to remain strong. Her
co-workers are peripheral, aiding in telling the more compelling story of her
depression. Sandra attempts to overdose on Xanax midway through. But when a
co-worker walks into her house, apologizing for denying her support, Sandra
immediately admits what she has done. The scene quickly cuts to her in a
hospital bed, where we see her tied to an IV. It’s not about what the
co-workers think, or what her husband thinks, or what her children think. It’s
about Sandra waking up in that bed, and deciding with her husband to not give
up. Her suicide attempt, instead of being a grand climax, is a result of
the impossible position she finds herself in: a person vulnerable to depression,
in her most broken state, fighting to convince others that she matters, but
failing miserably. There is a fascinating morality question implied here. Grown-ups are
never the ones who can make the decision to give, because they have responsibilities: children, electric bills, mortgages. Two Days, One Night is not simply concerned with
the morality of Sandra's co-workers, but with Sandra's as
well. “There is only one really serious philosophical
problem,” the French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus says, “and that is
suicide.” In each interaction with her husband, children and co-workers, Sandra is coming to terms with what it means to live and for whom must we live life
if not for ourselves.
The craft of the Dardennes is
refined and austere, as we see in the film’s most dramatic moments, but it
manages to be effortlessly uplifting as well. They take in a co-worker, recently
broken-up with an abusive husband who refuses to allow her to vote for Sandra's
reinstatement (“I have never done anything for myself,” she tells them). Sandra's husband Manu plays “Gloria” on the radio to lighten the mood. All three of them in the car
belt out the refrain with genuine joy. It’s a well-earned moment,
heartfelt and touching. Life isn’t about work, the Dardennes remind us; it’s
about these completely carefree moments with those we love.
We work to live, not live to work.
We spend a lot of time watching
Sandra walk, and this is where Cotillard’s most subtle and refined moments of
acting happen. She’s summoning the courage to push herself forward, a slump or
anxious face concealing more than revealing how vulnerable she might be. The
challenge presented to us is that we must observe carefully. There
are big moments, of course: she “pisses off” quite a few people in this film,
inciting a son to knock out his father when they disagree about what side to
take. But the most affecting moments of the film revolve around the ordinary
interactions. A three-minute long phone call tells us more about who
Sandra is than any line of dialogue can; watching her facial expressions break
from hopeful to hopeless open us up to her deepest longings. The first person
she goes up to convince to forgo the bonus breaks down, not because they are
good friends, but because he remembered something as insignificant as when Sandra
took the blame for a first-time mistake he once made. We see a woman who
desires desperately to forge meaning out of the drudgery that life can become.
The villains in this film aren’t
quite villainous, and the heroes not necessarily heroes either. These
other co-workers in the film, as we see throughout, are living similar
working-class lives to Sandra, attempting to survive and savor the positive
when possible. The men and women of this world are utilitarians, favoring
the practical over the emotional. Sandra sympathizes with those who refuse her
request. Her instinct isn’t to fight, but to internalize the rejections she
receives. Jean-Marc – as close to a villain as we find in the film – isn’t even
as bad as we think he is. Throughout, Sandra justifies this recasting of
ballots as a result of a bias Jean-Marc instilled in the co-workers. As it
turns out, none of them needed much convincing to throw Sandra under the bus.
Her co-workers seem not to acknowledge this conspiracy at all. Juliette
(Catherine Salée) is no hero either – we learn she is more financially stable
than the other workers, able to forgo the extra money because she can.
Her husband appears to be a big
support system, but a lot between them is left ambiguous. When we
dig deeper into the relationship between Manu and Sandra, we understand that a
lot is suggested rather than explicit. He’s supportive, but this is no reason
to necessarily feel good. She tells him in one scene that they are only
together because he feels bad for her, that they haven’t had sex in four
months. Manu does not deny this, only assures her that everything is going to
be alright. Sandra cannot know this, however, because she doesn’t even know if
she will be alright once sun has set and the next day comes; her depression
might set in when she least expects it. The dynamic they have is complicated,
joyous, even cute in certain moments, but it's never definitive: Sandra must make
it so.
Does Sandra’s decision at the end
make her the movie’s only true hero? After the employees at the solar panel company
vote and reach a stalemate, her supervisor Dumont tells her that they will rehire
her once the month is over and terminate another contract-worker instead.
Everyone will keep their bonuses and everyone will be happy… right?
The contract worker she meets (they
do not know each other before their encounter) is a young guy, with a daughter
and a wife, who had no moral stake in the film's events because of his
unfamiliarity with Sandra. He only
votes her out because he wants to get along with the other workers – his personal salary
increase was a measly 150 euros. Meeting her, however, changes his mind.
Despite the reality that he will be fired if she’s rehired, he goes along with
it anyways.
We can imagine her accepting the
request to stay if this offer was made to her before, but Sandra has become
someone else by the end of the film. Sandra’s decision to walk out on
Dumont forces you to reconsider why she went on this hunt in the first place.
It was never about the job, it was about being treated as a human being in an
economic climate ready to remind you of your insignificance. It’s a moral
quest, and what she finds at the end of her journey is important and crucial to
her growth. The last shot, of her walking away alone in silence, suggests that this journey is incomplete. Two days and one night have passed, and while it felt like no time, it showed us the capacity of the human
being to change and grow, to adapt and survive, to find meaning.
Two Days,
One Night is a film of
tremendous subtlety, thrilling drama and frightening truth. Issues of labor,
collectivization, globalization and depression bubble to the surface within
this tightly-structured and utterly-poetic quest, not only through the Belgium
suburbs, but through the human heart. It won’t leave you with solid conclusion,
only the frightening reality of, ‘what if?’ and, ‘who are we?’
Grade: A
Grade: A