Two Days, One Night

The Dardenne brothers make films about hard times and tough choices, balancing so much human misery against soul-stirring acts of kindness. Their latest, Two Days, One Night, may be their most accomplished work to date; a socialist epic in miniature, heartfelt and humane. It’s a film that finds the brothers shuffling away from the margins and embracing the mainstream. But they do so on their own terms, with their integrity intact.

Marion Cotillard gives a rousing performance as Sandra, the depressed mother who faces the axe from her minimum-wage job at the solar panel plant. The management is bent on edging her out. Her cash-strapped colleagues have sold her clean down the river. Sandra’s only hope is to persuade a majority of her co-workers to forgo their €1,000 bonuses ahead of an official vote on Monday morning. “Fight for your job,” her husband urges, and yet Sandra is hardly fit enough to haul herself out of bed, let alone wade into battle. The clock keeps on ticking and the weekend is running out.

All credit to the Dardennes for finding an intimate tragedy that shouts so loud to the world beyond. The brothers take one woman’s tottering odyssey and give it the heft of a mythic struggle, like a low-rent labours of Hercules in which the original tasks are replaced by the locked door, the secret ballot and the bottle of Xanax on the bathroom shelf. Their heroine picks her way through the pebbledashed suburbs of her Belgian home town, pleading her case to people she has worked alongside and yet barely seems to know. Some refuse to let her in while others respond with a spluttering show of defiance. “I didn’t vote against you,” one explains. “I voted for my bonus.”

Sandra, we come to realise, is not the only victim of this tale. Her fellow employees are similarly overstretched, working illicit weekend jobs. They need that €1,000 to keep their heads above water. And yet the harder Sandra toils, the more she grows in strength.

She takes heart from her husband’s support, from a glimmer of hope at a football pitch, and from the sound of Them’s blues anthem Gloria, bursting like sunshine from the tinny speakers of the family car. Her weekend jaunt does not entirely go as planned. She sees the best of humanity in addition to the worst.

If the film is full of victims, who exactly is the villain? Occasionally, one identifies a possible culprit. There are the brawling colleagues by the lock-up garage; the weaselly foreman who engineered the initial show of hands. Yet these, I think, are mere distractions, a set of stock and brutish archetypes. More likely the film’s real evil-doer is the one we never see. Implicitly (and sometimes not so implicitly), Two Days, One Night slams and damns modern management techniques, lifting the lid on a culture of short-term contracts and non-unionised labour. What’s the answer? Bond together. In throwing a lifeline to the anguished Sandra, the workers are surely rescuing themselves as well.