Peter Bradshaw 

Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) review – Marion Cotillard gives a supremely intelligent performance

Marion Cotillard is outstanding as a desperate mother lobbying co-workers for her job back in this agonising social drama from the Dardenne brothers, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  

Two Days, One Night
Nuanced … Fabrizio Rongione and Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night. Photograph: Allstar Photograph: Allstar/LES FILMS DU FLEUVE/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

The Dardenne brothers may have outdone themselves with this heartwrenching film; it is set to be a classic drama of working lives and, in its way, a classic trade union drama – though one in which trade unions are conspicuous by their absence. The subtly magnificent central performance from Marion Cotillard underpins everything; she is the first A-lister the Dardennes have cast, and yet never seems like some celebrity-exotic lowered into a grim social-realist setting. Cotillard looks real, sounds real. This supremely intelligent performer has found an utterly authentic relationship with the material. It is an impassioned, exciting and moving film – a 12 Angry Men of the 21st-century workplace.

Cotillard plays Sandra, a married woman with children who returns to work at a solar panel factory after a nervous breakdown, only to find that, with extreme bureaucratic cowardice, the management have effectively made her a sacrificial victim. She is the subject of a Sophie's Non-Choice offered to the rest of the staff.

While she's been away, they have realised that the work can be achieved without her, so now they are proposing to fire Sandra and make everyone else work that bit harder, with a one-off ¤1,000 bonus apiece as a sweetener — paid for out of savings from the lowered wage bill. Desperately, Sandra forces her duplicitous staff rep Jean-Marc (a cameo from Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet) to institute a vote. Do they want their bonus or save their friend and colleague Sandra? The vote's on Monday morning, so Sandra must spend the weekend touring around, canvassing door-to-door. She must endure the mortifying ordeal of begging her co-workers for her own job back, people who desperately need this "bonus" to get by. If Sandra can get nine votes out of 16, her bacon has been saved – which is to say, she returns to the same divisive and alienating employment that has caused this nightmare in the first place. She has nothing to offer her friends and neighbours but her desperation. As the anxiety mounts, so do her depression symptoms: hyperventilation, throat-constriction and a worrying addiction to Xanax. More is at stake than her job.

The importance is all up there in the title: the weekend. This is everyone's precious downtime, this is when they spend time with their families, or fix their place up, or handle necessary chores, or coach a kids' football team. This is why they work the rest of the week; this is their life. And it is a life on which Sandra is intruding – as she realises, to her intestine-twisting agony. Every family she visits is upset, and disturbed. She asks them to sympathise with her; they ask her to sympathise with them, and the insidious choice causes dissension and dismay. One co-worker breaks down in tears in pure self-reproach that he did not stand up for her sooner; others are unhappy and ambiguous. As often as not, Sandra leaves in failure, leaving an argument or a marital split, or a fully fledged fist-fight in her wake. And yet she has to do it to survive: she must keep going to build a consensus and drive the opinion past the tipping point. What she has to lose is her dignity and calm – the very things work is supposed to protect.

The Dardennes have made a brilliant social-realist drama with a real narrative tension that is a novelty in their work. It is reminiscent of Ken Loach's Bread and Roses (2000) in which Adrien Brody played a union campaigner who tours around buildings persuading terrified cleaning workers to join a union: he is (at least, at first) a deeply upsetting presence. As for this solar-panel company, it appears to have a union in place, in that a vote has been forced that the management will abide by, but it is a union that manages and regulates the decisions of those above them, and they are certainly not strong or united enough to reject out of hand the insidious bonus/Sandra choice. But solidarity is what the film is about: a union, in fact. This is what Sandra is trying to achieve as her emotional state comes to pieces, through a majority vote in a democratic election.

It is another great performance from Cotillard. She is restrained and dignified, and she seems as small and vulnerable as when she played Edith Piaf; and yet she radiates a determination and strength, even when she is in the most desperate situation. Again, Cotillard shows what a marvellous technical actor she is: every nuance and detail is readably present on her face. She is compelling and moving, and so is the film.

 

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