The impressive and relevant Two Days, One Night wowed at the Cannes Film Festival with a suspenseful tale of a woman (Marion Cotillard) battling to keep her job.
Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night
Sundance Selects
Marion Cotillard's latest movie Two Days, One Night is an eerily resonant rallying cry for the new economy. The film, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, follows a factory worker who's put up against the pitiless mathematics of business. But Two Days, One Night doesn't just show this classic battle on empathetic, human terms, it turns it into an intense, small-scale thriller.
The film comes from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who've made a career of telling stories about characters on the fringes of society whose lives have an awful precariousness — the poor or illegal, the unemployed or parentless. They've twice won the Palme d'Or, the top prize at Cannes, and Two Days, One Night, which will be released in the U.S. by Sundance Selects, makes them solid candidates for a three-peat.
More excitingly, it's also posed to bring the Dardennes their widest audience yet, since it finds them uncharacteristically working with a big star — Oscar winner Cotillard, who leaves the makeup and designer duds behind to play Sandra, a Belgian woman who, with her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) and two kids, has been struggling toward the middle class. Sandra's one of 17 workers at a solar panel factory who's been given a brutal decision — she can have her yearly bonus of 1,000 euros or she can keep her job. The vote's already gone against Sandra, but due to some interference by the foreman, the head of the company's going to allow for a recount on Monday. Sandra has the weekend to track down as many of her co-workers as possible and try to get them to forgo a considerable amount of money so that she can stay employed.
Two Days, One Night
Sundance Selects
The loss of her job would mean Sandra and her family wouldn't be able to keep paying their mortgage, and it would also make Sandra more likely to slide back into the depression that made her vulnerable to the company's decision in the first place. Sandra's not a natural fighter, and she understands economic desperation well enough that she feels terrible asking such a sacrifice of people ("I'm not pissing anyone else off!" she cries after a particularly dispiriting encounter). The difficulty of her experiences makes her slow finding of strength all the more rousing. Some of her co-workers are on her side, and some are angry that she's even making this request of them. Some avoid her and some ask forgiveness. Two Days, One Night is breathtakingly unsentimental about Sandra's predicament, so that when she finds moments of solidarity, they're hard-won and heartbreaking.
Sandra's not outsized and she's not naturally heroic. She's apologetic and fragile and ready, early on, to accept defeat and give into self-pity and despondency. Two Days, One Night isn't about something as simple as her learning to stand up to the man; it's about her coming to understand how unfair the choice Sandra and her co-workers have been given is, that they're are being made to feel responsible and complicit in managerial decisions, that they're falsely manipulated into feeling grateful for whatever they're given. It's about rejecting the narrative the company's giving them, that they're just part of a number's game, and it feels like a bracingly relevant update on the labor film.
No comments:
Post a Comment