Two Days, One Night
Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne
95 mins; Class 15;
Eden Cinemas Release

The Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have been making films about ordinary folks dealing with everyday hardships since the late 1970s.

For the most part, they write, produce and direct their films together. Their films have won two Palmes D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (Rosetta in 1999 and The Kid with a Bike in 2005), and I am surprised that Two Days, One Night, which was in contention this year, did not yield them a third.

Marion Cotillard stars as Sandra, who, on recovering from a bout of depression, is ready to return to work only to find her job is at risk.

Sandra learns that, having managed quite well without her, her colleagues have been asked by management to vote whether to bring her back… or get a €1,000 bonus each.

The outcome is predictable and, having just a weekend to change their minds, Sandra goes door-to-door in an exhausting and humiliating exercise to claim back her job and ultimately her dignity.

Redundancy remains a topical issue, given the consequences of the 2008 recession are still strongly felt in some areas, and in their film, the Dardennes put a human face on the thousands of anonymous workers who struggle daily to keep their jobs.

There is so much to savour in her performance

Cotillard brings to life their plight with a performance in which she lays bare her emotions with remarkable honesty. There is no evidence of Cotillard the international movie star in the simply dressed, barely made-up woman who walks on the precipice of a relapse into her depression as she struggles to keep things together, crying at the tiniest slight, a hint that she may not yet be strong enough to face the battle ahead.

There is so much to savour in her performance, I don’t know where to begin.

What makes the whole emotionally more difficult is the fact that none of the people she visits (bar that one conflict) are essentially bad – especially those who accept to talk to her, as Sandra deals with the occasional bout of indifference if not a slammed door or silent intercom.

They are ordinary people like her, many of them with young children struggling with the same realities she does. One lays it out starkly: “The bonus will cover a year’s water and electricity bills,” reasons which Sandra can’t help but acknowledge are valid.

As the weekend draws to a close and that fateful Monday looms – and we the audience by this point are as much in anguish as she is - she learns that her struggle was not about the outcome, but the journey itself.

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