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.

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Along with England’s 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. “Two Days, One Night” (2015, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, 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 — Sandra — is laid off. The movie asks those co-workers and the audience a simple question: What’s the price of solidarity? In “Two Days, One Night,” it’s one thousand Euros — the amount of that bonus.

In my 2015 Boston Globe review, I wrote, “We 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? ‘Two Days, One Night’ 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 Sandra’s situation but just can’t do it; others refuse outright, their guilt enflaming them with self-righteousness. Coursing underneath the film’s calm, observant surface is a fury at a system that sets people in the same leaky boat at each other’s throats…

The drama of this movie is in watching Sandra find her balance and her pride once more, and at no time do you feel you’re 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 woman’s fragility and the strength that, through her own nerve and the support of others, comes slowly flooding back.

“Two Days, One Night” 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 — well, that’s why the Dardennes make movies.

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