Belgian writer/director brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardenne are masters of cinema as empathy. Their films are studies of people on
the margins, working class people struggling to get by or living with a modicum
of comfort they fear will be taken away. With sensitive camerawork and
brilliant naturalistic acting, they create small-scale portraits of lives lived
in quiet desperation. They’re remarkably consistent. In their every film, from La Promisse and Rosetta to L’Enfant and The Kid with a Bike, there are
characters confronted with problems that threaten to destabilize them, the
filmmakers showing us with great patience and sympathy reactions and responses.
They’re preternaturally attuned to moral questions, watching characters as they
try their best to work them out.
In their latest, Two
Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard plays a woman whose factory job rests in
the hands of her coworkers. She’s been off work for a while dealing with
debilitating depression, her husband looking after the kids and keeping the
household running. Now that she’s finally ready to return, bringing in her
family’s much-needed main income, the bosses have called for a vote.
Money is tight, so the employees must decide between their annual bonuses and
Cotillard’s job. The first vote went resoundingly to bonuses. Extenuating
circumstances have allowed for a revote on Monday. When the film begins, it’s Friday.
She decides to use the weekend to visit her coworkers one by one, face to face,
hoping to get enough votes to save her job.
The film follows her as she enacts this sadistic game show
construct foisted upon her. It’s almost too much for her to bear. We see she
cries easily, would rather be staying in bed, and is generally in a bad state.
She’s barely able to work again, and certainly not in any condition to be confronted with such a cruel turn of
circumstances. Cotillard, in a brilliant performance rich with interiority and
psychological detail, embodies the bruised psyche of a woman who has barely
clawed her way back to the early hints of an even-keeled emotional state. She
moves with fragility in her posture, preemptive pain in her eyes before every
encounter. She hopes her presence will remind her coworkers of her humanity,
and their own.
The film’s structure takes on a ritualistic movement,
confronting each coworker in turn with the moral and economic calculus involved
in the vote and seeing their true selves reflected in their reactions. The
Dardennes tensely and inquisitively build scenes of confrontation, quickly
sketching in working relationships between Cotillard and her coworkers as we
hear their reasons, excuses, and evasions. The saddest thing is, the others
need their bonuses, often badly, or at least for clear, convincing reasons no
less important than Cotillard’s need for her job. In small, but momentous,
encounters, each character must confront a crucial question, weighing the ideal
collective action against their rational self-interest. What is more important?
A bigger year-end paycheck or the continued employment of one of their own?
Simply structured, plainspoken, deeply felt, Two Days, One Night is a tremendous
emotional wringer. It pushes a woman into an unbearably fraught condition, and
watches as she desperately appeals to others for help. That her employers, the
very source of her income and social interaction, have put her in this spot
makes it all the worse. As an evocation of the economic construct so many live
out on a daily basis – the establishment forcing the working class into
conflict with each other, the better to keep them from turning conflict upwards
– it’s merciless of plot. We watch this dynamic play out in these characters
lives, and the Dardennes bring to it every bit of their humane specificity,
charting the emotional terrains of people forced into making big decisions
about another’s life. It’s a work of invigorating empathy.
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