Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit)

Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne
Stars: Marion Cotillard (Sandra), Fabrizio Rongione (Manu), Pili Groyne (Estelle), Simon Caudry (Maxime), Catherine Salée (Juliette), Baptiste Sornin (Mr. Dumont), Alain Eloy (Willy),Myriem Akheddiou (Mireille), Fabienne Sciascia (Nadine), Timur Magomedgadzhiev (Timur), Hicham Slaoui (Hicham), Philippe Jeusette (Yvon), Yohan Zimmer (Jérôme), Christelle Cornil (Anne), Laurent Caron (Julien), Franck Laisné (Dominique), Serge Koto (Alphonse), Morgan Marinne (Charly), Gianni La Rocca (Robert), Ben Hamidou (Kader), Carl Jadot (Miguel), Olivier Gourmet (Jean-Marc)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2014
Country: Belgium / France / Italy
 Two Days One Night Criterion Collection Blu-ray
Two Days, One NightThe title of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s masterful and movingly humane Two Days, One Night refers to the amount of time that the film’s protagonist, a working-class woman named Sandra (Marion Cotillard), has to save her job. While she was on sick leave due to depression, the foreman at the plant where she works presented her 16 coworkers with a choice: either keep Sandra on or give up a 1,000 Euro bonus. Because the vote was done in the open, the foreman was present, and Sandra was not, the vast majority of her coworkers voted for the bonus, thus leaving her suddenly in the lurch without employment.

At the behest of her friend and coworker Juliette (Catherine Salée) and her steady, supportive husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), Sandra convinces her boss, Mr. Dumont (Baptiste Sornin), to hold a second, secret vote on Monday morning, which gives her the titular two days and one night to try to meet personally with each of her coworkers to convince him or her to give up the bonus and vote for her to stay on. While Manu is employed as a line chef in a restaurant, they still need Sandra’s salary to pay the rent and bills and support their two children, hence the urgency of convincing her coworkers to vote for her to stay. Of course, that is no easy feat: there are 14 to convince (Juliette and another man, Robert, already having pledged their support), and she needs a simple majority of them to vote for her and forego the bonus.

Thus, the Daredennes establish a simple narrative structure, as Sandra travels around Seraing (the industrial town in Belgium that has been the setting of virtually all the Dardennes’ films) to each coworker’s home address, delivering to him or her the same simple plea that she be kept on. There is an inherent danger in this structure, in that it risks becoming repetitive, but it actually works to the drama’s strength as each encounter allows us to see the same moral struggle from a slightly different perspective. Sandra has a routine and says the same basic thing to each person with whom she meets, but at different times she is in different emotional states, and the stakes at the beginning when she has almost no one on her side are different than the stakes near the end when she is closing in on the majority she needs.

The coworkers come to represent a fascinating cross-section of working class humanity, as most of them are sympathetic to her plight, but have their own financial issues. Some of them have better reasoning than others, but, as the great humanist director Jean Renoir said in his masterpiece The Rules of the Game (1939), “The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.” A few of the coworkers are openly hostile, some are immediately sympathetic and willing to forego their own benefit to save her job, but most are awkwardly reluctant, snagged in the crossfire of their own needs and the realization that they will be directly responsible for a decent, hardworking woman losing her job. The film’s dramatic force emerges from the pained conflict between Sandra and those with whom she works, who in any other situation would be her allies, but instead have been pitted against her by the foreman, Jean-Marc (Olivier Gourmet), who is actively campaigning against her by spreading mistruths about Sandra. It is an impossible situation that requires sacrifice from someone, although ironically (and frustratingly) not from Jean-Marc, the man who engineered it in the first place.

Casting Oscar winner Marion Cotillard as Sandra is a first for the Dardennes, as their previously stripped down realist dramas have starred less well-known actors and nonprofessionals who more easily blend into the day-to-day fabric of their films. Casting Cotillard risks being a distraction, but it isn’t, as Cotillard’s physical features fit the character beautifully—her seemingly fragile frame, wide face and soulful eyes that oscillate between emotional breakdown and steely determination—and she gives the character a powerful tenderness that casts her depression not so much as mental illness as the unavoidable symptom of a decent soul cast into an often heartless world.

Like the Dardennes’ previous films, including La promesse (1996), L’enfant (2005), and The Kid With a Bike (2012), Two Days, One Night does not shy away from the harsh truths of life, especially life in the lower middle class where staying afloat is always a struggle; but, at the same time, they seek out and reveal hope and potential in every situation. With a gracefulness that has come to define their unique kind of modern neorealist cinema, the Dardennes manage to find a way to end the film that is true to the unavoidable disappointments of life while also suggesting that those very disappointments can be truly liberating.

Two Days, One Night Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Aspect Ratio1.85:1
AudioFrench DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround
SubtitlesEnglish
Supplements
  • Video interview with the Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
  • Video interview with actors Marion Cotillard and Fabrizio Rongione
  • When Léon M.’s Boat Went Down the Meuse for the First Time (1979), a forty-minute documentary by the Dardennes, featuring a new introduction by the directors
  • Tour of the film’s key locations with the directors
  • To Be an I, video essay by critic Kent Jones
  • Trailer
  • Essay by critic Girish Shambu
  • DistributorThe Criterion Collection
    SRP$39.95
    Release DateAugust 25, 2015

    VIDEO
    The new 2K digital master, which was supervised by director of photography Alain Marcoen and approved by directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, is a direct digital port, as the film was shot on an ARRI ALEXA digital camera. The image looks great, with strong colors and excellent contrast and detail that really bring out the nuances of the environments, which were all shot on location. The soundtrack is presented in 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master Audio, although it is, as with the Dardennes’ previous films, a relatively low-key soundtrack that is composed entirely of dialogue and environmental sound (no non-diegetic music at all). There are a few points where characters listen to the radio in the car, and the surround speakers fill out nicely, suggesting the experience of the characters being enveloped in music.

    SUPPLEMENTS
    The supplements begin with an excellent, nearly hour-long interview with writer/directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who speak at length about the film’s genesis, the production, and their approach to filmmaking. The Dardennes also appear in a 37-minute featurette in which they return to four of the key filming locations in Seraing and discuss those scenes. Also on the disc is a 22-minute featurette built around separate interviews with actors Marion Cotillard and Fabrizio Rongione, who discuss working on the film and their approaches to creating their characters. Those interested in the Dardennes’ work prior to their fictional feature films will be thrilled by the inclusion of When Léon M.’s Boat Went Down the Meuse for the First Time, a 40-minute documentary they made in 1979 that also features a new introduction by the directors. Finally, film critic Kent Jones contributes a short, 8-minute visual essay titled To Be an I in which he explores the Dardennes’ recurring theme of hope.

    Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © The Criterion Collection / Sundance Selects



    Overall Rating: (4)




    James Kendrick

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