Movie Review - 'Two Days, One Night': Marion Cotillard Delivers Powerful Turn in Everyman Tale
The Dardenne brothers are among some of the most successful filmmakers of the modern era.
Their storytelling takes on a hugely naturalistic bent that documents the everyday struggles of the common man. Poverty, loneliness and desperation take on central themes in their oeuvre. Their latest film "Two Days, One Night," which has become Belgium's official selection for the Academy Awards' Foreign Film competition, is arguably among their finest work.
As the 2015 Oscars contender opens, the viewer watched a closeup of Sandra (Marion Cotillard) sleeping. While she lies in her unconscious state, a phone rings, lending a rather ominous quality to the scene. And within moments, this dread is confirmed. Sandro learns that she has been fired from work, and the only hope she has is to convince her boss to allow her coworkers to vote to keep her in. But it isn't so easy. The workers had already voted to kick her out in order to earn individual bonuses of about 1,000 Euros.
Aided by a colleague Juliette, Sandra convinces the company's executive to allow for a new vote on Monday. He agrees, and Sandra is tasked with finding all 16 of her colleagues and convincing nine of them to vote in her favor and overlook their bonues.
Admittedly, a task easier said than done and a film that could have gone completely wrong. The scenario and structure is rather straightforward and seemingly repetitive. Sandra gets the addresses for each colleague and tracks each one of them down over the course of the weekend. She talks to them about the situation and tries to convince each one to help her out. Some say yes, others no and she becomes increasingly neurotic as the situation becomes more and more unstable. Her solution for her stress is to down some pills, which causes some concern for her loving husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione).
But these are the Dardennes that we are talking about. They are legendary filmmakers who have a tremendous grasp on narrative structure and revel in the repetitious cycle of life. Their last film "The Kid With a Bike" followed a similar structure. A boy wants to be accepted, so he goes from one person to the next seeking out a companion. But each scenario, as similar as it might be visually and aurally (the cinematography follows a very strict pattern and even some of the dialogue is repeated verbatim), contains the redundancy of life paired with tremendous nuance. Sandra may repeat the same lines to her colleagues, but the circumstances are all different contextually and emotionally. How she deals with them individually is really the strength of the film and Cotillard's wondrous performance.
And while the viewer desperately wants this poor women to win over her colleagues, the Dardennes and the audience know that there is no easy solutions in life. And moreover, almost every single one of her colleagues offers a compelling and completely understandable case for taking their respective positions that it is impossible to get angry with them. One character needs the bonus to pay for his daughter's education, and another just separated from her husband and needs all the money she can get to survive. Some characters are admittedly jerks that you cannot help but despise, but that is life in a nutshell.
In one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film, one colleague agrees to vote for her, but apologizes for betraying Sandra during the initial vote. He explains that he needed the bonus, but he hated to turn against her in that great moment of need.
The film moves at a methodical pace, but it is Cotillard's internal struggle that propels the pace. One look at her and the viewer knows the storm brewing inside. Here is a woman who has undergone some sort of unexplained accident and faces the prospect of looking for another job while raising two children. Meanwhile, she has a drug addiction and lacks self-confidence. She feels awful asking her colleagues to give away their money and, in many ways, becomes more of an obstacle in achieving her goal than her colleagues do. This is splendid drama that comes not only from the circumstances of the external world but from the conflicted internal world that is Marion Cotillard's Sandra.
She will not always be likeable. In fact, her defeatist attitude will certainly get on people's nerves, but that is reality. People do not simply take hard decisions at ease and get up and keep trying. They must overcome their deepest fears and demons numerous times throughout the ordeal. Sandra is a walking contradiction, but that only makes her more relatable and palpable.
The other brilliant character in this film is Alain Marcoen's deliciously subtle cinematography. Almost every encounter between Sandra and a colleague is filmed the same way--a medium two shot from the waste up with Sandra occupying one side of the frame and the colleague on the other.
The cinematography often tells us what is going to happen before it happens using some sort of surface divider. In her first encounter, a rack in the foreground divides the screen in half with Sandra on one side of it and her coworker and his wife in another. Later on, Sandra is framed on one side of a doorway while another worker is placed on the other side of the frame.
Perhaps the most potent example of this motif comes when Sandra meets with Julien in the street. The brick wall is divided into two areas with two distinct patterns. Sandra occupies one area and Julien the other, thus expressing their opposition in the most clear of manners. It is nothing revolutionary, but it is effective and creates a unique visual narrative within the audience's mind.
The moment that camera has been framed, the viewer can almost tell how the circumstance will turn out based on the framing and visual cues; this allows the viewer in a way to anticipate what Sandra will have to deal with and allow the audience to follow her even more closely. One scene that breaks this pattern actual connects Sandra and her friend in one shot. The camera pans from one to another, connecting them emotionally in the moment. It is a poignant scene and cinematography only enhances it.
"Two Days, One Night" is a tremendously polished film from two cinematic geniuses. It packs quite an emotional punch in its final twist and features a distilled narrative that anyone can relate to on some level. Cotillard's performance is arguably her most refined and potent to date.
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