Two Days, One Night - film review: 'Thanks to an extraordinary performance from Marion Cotillard, it feels like a life-or-death affair'

The latest offering from the Dardenne brothers, starring Marion Cotillard, is about the beauty of solidarity and the quiet happiness that blooms when one treats co-workers with respect
Office outcast: Marion Cotillard as the depression-prone Sandra in Two Days, One Night (Picture: Allstar)
Allstar
Charlotte O'Sullivan22 August 2014

Do you storm into work every morning in a cloud of rage, loathing every single one of your colleagues and hoping they'll have died a painful death by close of day? If so, avoid Two Days, One Night. The latest offering from the Dardenne brothers is about the beauty of solidarity and the quiet happiness that blooms when one treats co-workers with respect.

It goes without saying that this isn't your typical, August shoot-em-up. Yet, thanks mostly to a tight script and an extraordinary performance from Marion Cotillard, each of its 95 minutes feels like a life-or-death affair.

After a bout of depression, mother of two, Sandra (Cotillard), is ready to return to work at a small factory. In her absence, however, her urbane boss (Baptiste Sornin) has decided she's dispensable and manipulated Sandra's colleagues into feeling the same way. If she's allowed back, the 16 members of the team will lose their annual bonus. Still, because this is Belgium — where apparently unions still have a smidgeon of clout — Sandra has a chance to save her skin, via a second ballot. Encouraged by her husband, she uses the weekend to track down her co-workers, at their homes. Can she persuade them she needs her job more than they need the extra cash?

This door-stepper, despite being gorgeous and wearing tight fitting vests that show off her bra straps, is not an indefatigable, Erin Brockovich-style charmer. Often high on Xanax, Sandra zones in and out before our eyes and, even at her most fortified, walks with the stiff-knees of someone who fears they're about to collapse. She's not cute fragile, she's really fragile, which means we're horrified when her colleagues get rough (one shoves her aside, another calls her a bitch). Yet we also wonder, at times, if the boss is right to want to cut her loose.

All the acting, many of it by non-professionals, is astounding (look out for an explosive turn by Russian dancer, Timur Magomedgadzhiev). Meanwhile, the camerawork – as deceptively simple as the plot – makes us aware that these characters lack space, as well as money. Someone darts behind a bin, because they don't want to be seen crying, and the camera itself hangs back, allowing the person to stay partially hidden. The Dardennes loiter on the borderlines of intimacy, those places where no one is quite at home.

Moments of respite are all the more welcome for being rare (one especially lovely epiphany involves Petula Clark's La Nuit n'en finit plus.) True, on the Sunday night, things get slightly more melodramatic and it's no surprise that the film, despite the high esteem in which the Dardennes are held, failed to win anything at Cannes. It's not austere enough to please art-house purists, but maybe that's no bad thing. Sandra is looking for the majority vote. Open the door to this woman and you won't be sorry that you did.

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