MARION COTILLARD IN TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

The profound humanism of the Dardennes meets the sublime beauty of Marion Cotillard

What can we add to our appreciation of the Dardenne brothers' profound humanism and grasp of working class poor hard knocks? The sublime beauty of Marion Cotillard as a woman recovering from debilitating depression who must visit a dozen-plus co-workers to beg them to vote for her instead of a €1000 bonus. Two Days, One Night dramatizes how in modern labor situations if the firm is too small for a union, management pits one worker against another. Hence when Sandra (Cotillard) is about to return to work, she learns owner M. Dumont (Batiste Sornin) and his supervisor Jean-Marc (Olivier Gourmet) have forced her coworkers to choose between the bonus and keeping her on, as if it had to be one or the other. This is a study in courage. It dramatizes the everyday struggle to stay where you are; how, minute by minute, the poor must fight just to hope. Probably in the post-Great Recession world this is a situation more people can relate to, when homelessness or a steep dive from a formerly comfortable lifestyle can lie in wait even for members of the middle class.

Even by Dardennes standards, Two Days, One Night thrives on its ordinariness and specificity. One by one, with support from her husband Manu (Dardennes regular Fabrizio Rongione, seen also in the 2014 NYFF in Green's very different Sapienza), Sandra visits or calls the others, and each is particular, each much the same. Each in the multi-ethnic crew needs the extra money, feels for her, but must look to themselves. Different only are Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev), a spare time soccer coach, who feels so guilty and indebted to Sandra for her covering for him when he messed up as a newbie, met by the soccer field, he bursts into tears; and Alphonse (Serge Koto), not yet hired on full time, tracked down at the laundromat, who simply fears reprisals from the other workers if he votes for her, though doing so is what God tells him to do.

Otherwise the narrative stays close to these similar one-by-one meetings, avoiding surges of drama -- though there is drama in Sandra's sorrow and emotional pain. She claims to all she is "en forme" again now, but to Manu she constantly pleads she can't go on, feels like nobody. A possible wrong note: she pops too many pills, and when it turns out apparently to be Xanax, you wonder if this would be possible. Then she recovers from a suicide attempt perhaps too fast, too easily.

Cotillard is the most high-profile actor the Dardennes have used but proves a perfect fit. Their meeting with her near the set of Audiard's Rust and Bone was love at first sight. They could "not stop talking about her, her face, her look." And she was thrilled; had thought working for them was "beyond my reach." Her style is to hide dramatics, and so harmonizes perfectly with their way of working, and her dedication met the challenge of "becoming Belgian." Their last film, The Kid with the Bike, also featured a beautiful woman star, Cécile de France, but she is Belgian (and not the international star Cotillard has become). Cotillard is an actress who can make anything moving. Her presence here deepens an almost unconscious identification one feels, even as the action of Two Days, One Night may be less of a blow to the stomach than films like The Child, The Son, or La Promesse and less high-speed than Rosetta or The Kid with the Bike. Yet I think Two Days, One Night, which compares well with other powerful French-language films about work like Laurent Cantet's Time Out and Human Resources, has an unobtrusive beauty that will slowly creep into your heart and stay there.

Two Days, One Night/Deux jours, une nuit, 95 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition and opened the next day in France and Belgium (Allociné press rating: 4.0). Many other festivals and international releases; Telluride, Toronto, Vancouver. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release by IFC 24 December 2014, in NYC at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and IFC Center.

Watch Cannes Q&A for this film. Or with English voiceover translation.

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(For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.