“Two Days, One Night” may well be a small cinematic miracle, which would make it par for the course with the works of the Dardenne Brothers. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne write, produce, and direct together, and their body of work contains some of the greatest insights into the human condition as we’ve seen from any living filmmaker.
Deeply naturalistic in their style – typically using hand-held cameras with unaided lighting and often with unknown performers – the Dardennes consider their subjects primarily from a philosophical, even religious standpoint, and with a tangible inclusiveness of people from all walks of life. Their films focus on the poor, the heartbroken, the unemployed – the fringes of society – and their penetrating realism is awe-inspiring in its empathy. It’s not for nothing that their first major success, “Rosetta,” about a restless young girl living with her alcoholic mother in a trailer park, had the good fortune of impacting child labor laws in Belgium.
Their latest stars Marion Cotillard as Sandra, a wife and mother in recovery from a nervous breakdown and the resultant effects of depression on both her and her family. When the film begins, she’s expecting to finally return to work, instead learning that management, having observed production in her absence, has proposed eliminating her position altogether, with a ballot to be taken from her co-workers come Monday as to which they prefer: a sizable bonus, or Sandra.
The effect, of course, is devastating. Sandra’s task, then, is among the most insurmountable that can be presented to someone in her fragile state: with the ceaseless guidance of her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), she must approach her co-workers before the weekend is over and ask for their support. A majority of the vote will require at least nine votes out of 16. At the outset, Sandra has the stated support of only three.
In short, she must act now, or else resign herself to having given up, likely forcing her family to move back into welfare housing without her salary. The encounters she experiences with her co-workers (and the ones she doesn’t, in a key scene) span the general breadth of foreseeable reactions, with characters representing generosity, solidarity, sorrow, callousness, cowardice, and greed, among other things and not always in the expected form or combination.
The Dardenne’s films have often seemed like fables, not unlike a story that might be told in a sermon. “Two Days, One Night” is largely brilliant in its distillation of an otherwise very complex and difficult subject matter – depression, with inextricable (and, in the film, illustrated) ties to other hot topics – into a clean narrative without sacrificing meaning or condescending to the audience. The Dardenne’s make their spiritual approach well known, but there’s unspeakable value in how they allow so much of their stories to be told purely their the faces of their performers.
The episodic nature of Sandra’s quest allows for several chamber-like moments with other characters, where the camera is just as intimate a component as the raw performances, without a weak link across the board. Cotillard has given one of the great portrayals of mental illness, one that is exquisitely disarming and, even as an Oscar nominee, given too little credit for the completeness of her embodiment.
Isolated moments, such as an exchange with her husband over a song on the radio, lend great insight into the lives of those for whom there is a constant struggle for purpose. The simplicity of the narrative is also one of the film’s greatest strengths, with each lens it offers the viewer (as seen through gender politics, class struggle, mental illness, etc.) offering another wholly singular vantage point by which to interpret it. It’s a work of uncommon compassion, and one of the best films of 2014.
“Two Days, One Night” is currently playing in select theaters nationwide, and will open at the GoggleWorks Theatre on Friday, March 20th (dates subject to change)
Robert Humanick is a contributing writer for slantmagazine.com. Follow Rob on Twitter @rhumanick
