One Good Film: "Two Days, One Night" (2015)
One Good Film: "Two Days, One Night" (2015)
For Labor Day, a modern Dardennes brothers classic.
A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.
Along with Englandâs Ken Loach, the Dardennes brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, are the greatest chroniclers of the working class currently making movies. They regularly shoot in their Belgian hometown of Liege, among characters who are straining to make ends meet in an unforgiving global economy, and they create humane drama and genuine suspense out of struggles no less real for taking place among people the movies ordinarily caricature, ignore, or dismiss. âTwo Days, One Nightâ (2015, â â â â, streaming on AMC+ and Kanopy, for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, takes its title from the amount of time a factory worker named Sandra (Oscar-nominated Marion Cotillard, above) has to convince her co-workers to vote against a Christmas bonus that will be granted only if one of their own â Sandra â is laid off. The movie asks those co-workers and the audience a simple question: Whatâs the price of solidarity? In âTwo Days, One Night,â itâs one thousand Euros â the amount of that bonus.
In my 2015 Boston Globe review, I wrote, âWe come to understand that [Sandra] has been absent from work battling depression, that she has only recently begun to find her feet again. Losing the factory job means that she, her husband, Manu (Dardenne regular Fabrizio Rongione), and their two young children will have to move from their rental home to a housing project: a step or two back into the poverty they have been slowly raising their heads above.
Does a business owe anything to a struggling employee? Do employees owe anything to each other? âTwo Days, One Nightâ charts the possible answers as Sandra travels around the city, from apartment complexes to soccer fields to grocery stores where colleagues toil in weekend jobs. The Dardennes want us to understand what one thousand euros means to these people: a windfall to pay off mounting bills, to educate a child, to hold it together for one more year. Some are sympathetic to Sandraâs situation but just canât do it; others refuse outright, their guilt enflaming them with self-righteousness. Coursing underneath the filmâs calm, observant surface is a fury at a system that sets people in the same leaky boat at each otherâs throatsâŚ
The drama of this movie is in watching Sandra find her balance and her pride once more, and at no time do you feel youâre watching a glamour girl playing at being one of the little people. The Oscar nomination is deserved: Cotillard and the Dardennes convince us of both this womanâs fragility and the strength that, through her own nerve and the support of others, comes slowly flooding back.
âTwo Days, One Nightâ is an excellent film for this holiday, a reminder of everyday sweat, unfairness, community, and hope. And if it makes you angry enough to want to do something â well, thatâs why the Dardennes make movies.
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