The title of the latest film by the Belgium filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne describes the duration of the setting of the film, two days and one night, or, roughly, a weekend. The film’s cramped sense of temporality charges the plot with a sense of urgency. Marion Cotillard plays the central character, Sandra Bya, who finds herself in a particular bind. She is a wife and mother who works in a small solar panel factory. After a nervous breakdown keeps her out of work for months, her coworkers cover for her by working slightly longer shifts at the factory. The employer tells the employees that if they continue to cover for Sandra, allowing him to lay her off, he will reward them with a $1,000 bonus. In a desperate attempt to save her job, she buys a weekend to lobby her case with her colleagues. If she can get enough of them to vote to forgo their bonus for the sake of Sandra’s job, she’ll be able to keep it.
The themes that run through Two Days, One Night are familiar to the Dardenne’s particular brand of what you might call neo-social realism. Like their other films, the movie’s style owes itself to the filmmaker’s documentary roots as well as a tradition of socially conscious street films that harkens back to filmmakers like Victorio De Sica and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Shot largely with a handheld camera, and with a tight focus on its central character, the film possesses an intentionally belabored style. We lumber along with Sandra as she visits her colleagues one-by-one. Her appeal relies on a basic sense of human kindness. Her family needs her salary to survive, but her colleagues also claim a need for the $1,000 bonus. For some, it will be used for real material need, for others it offers the chance for a rare luxury purchase. The situation develops into a poignant moral fable, pitting personal and communal interests against one another.
Cotillard, who has emerged as one of the world’s most versatile and accomplished actresses, does her best to submerge her inner charisma – that quality that allows her to be convincing as a star in big films like The Dark Knight Rises and Inception – to portray her industrial everywoman. Perhaps the role would have been better suited to her talents earlier in her career; much of the power of early Dardenne movies like La Promise and Rosetta come from the use of unknown talents. But here Cotillard manages to underplay her role, to allow the interior drama that drives the film to manifest itself through its own absence from the surface of her performance. She manages to keep us in the taught anxiety of her situation throughout.
The situation is a portrait of a contemporary industrial capitalist society defined by Darwinian starkness. At first, this setting appears to reveal the inherent self-interest framing the decisions of even good-hearted, hard-working people. But as Sandra sets out to change the hearts of her colleagues, embedded in a kind of moral combat, the real test of the two days and one night is the way it challenges her own disposition to her situation, forcing her to reconsider her own personal conviction and strength of character.
