Two Days, One Night (2014)

Difficult 'Days': Marion Cotillard (right) confronts coworkers
in the working class drama "Two Days, One Night."

The practice of big business cutting back on labor costs to improve bottom line statistics is nothing new. If a company believes it can make more money by eliminating workers without suffering any significant drop in productivity, you can bet that firings and layoffs will be a popular proposal in front of some board of directors.

It sounds cruel and heartless, but there are plenty of horror stories detailing similar things going on beyond office doors on top floors. However, what about a scenario in which the fate of a worker is not determined by executives wearing expensive suits and polished shoes, but instead is a decision thrust into the same middle class hands of other workers?

“Two Days, One Night,” a new movie written and directed by the Belgian filmmaking brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, imagines such a situation in its tale of Sandra (the great French actress Marion Cotillard), a proletariat, thirty-something wife and mother who works at a company that produces solar panels. Upon returning from a leave of absence for an illness related to depression, she discovers that a vote has taken place among her colleagues to eliminate her job in favor of a large, one-time bonus for remaining workers.

The only way Sandra can save her job is to convince a majority of her coworkers (there are 16) to decline the bonus (one thousand euros each) so she can stay on the payroll. The movie unfolds by following her mortifying door to door trek to neighboring workmates, each time explaining her situation and modestly asking for their vote. The title refers to the last, tense weekend before a new vote on Monday morning determines her fate.

Sandra doesn’t beg or become hostile during these nervous moments; indeed, she is intelligent enough to understand that most people need the bonus for the same reason she needs her job. Consequently, as the days count down, the film becomes a fascinating, sometimes moving study of personalities and themes like class struggle, humanity and common decency. Cotillard’s tremulous, palpably agonizing performance as the blue collar heroine is outstanding.

For the most part, “Two Days, One Night” remains an honest and affecting piece of work, with the only serious miscalculation being a botched, then glossed-over suicide attempt that stretches believability and comes across as manipulative. Otherwise, the Dardenne’s realistic, almost documentary-like visual style—long takes and loose framing so multiple characters appear in a single composition—helps sustain a mood and look of solemn verisimilitude.

As Sandra glumly makes her way across the industrial landscape of Seraing, in the Belgian province of Liege where the movie was filmed, desperately campaigning for the last votes needed to keep her job, “Two Days, One Night” evokes Antonio’s frantic search for the stolen bike in Vittorio De Sica’s 1949 neorealist masterpiece, “The Bicycle Thief.”

While the situation was a lot more bleak in postwar Italy, in both movies, the line between suffering and success, between poverty and being able to make ends meet, pivots on man’s willingness—or lack thereof—to sacrifice material goods for the benefit of a fellow human being.