Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (La Promesse, The Kid With a Bike) are known for making movies that are grounded in reality, gritty, and steeped in basic human drama in all of the best ways. They tell simple stories that shine a spotlight on the inherent struggles that exist in the lives of normal, usually lower class people. Their films manage to resonate while still defying the expectations of how “cinematic” a story needs to be in order to make for a good movie. It should be said though that their work is often slow to build to a climax, once that climax happens it’s generally a personal one that affects only the protagonist and not the greater world around them, and the places their films take you can often leave you feeling a little down. If you’re the sort of person who can get on the Dardenne wavelength, then their movies are always easy to appreciate—and Two Days, One Night is no exception there—but they’re certainly not for everyone. So beware my praise.
Two Days, One Night focuses on a very important weekend in the life of a blue collar mother of two named Sandra (Marion Cotillard), who’s recently had some troubles at work thanks to a bout of depression leading to her having to take a leave of absence. Turns out the forced time off was just the beginning of her professional troubles though, as her boss has recently made the decree that the company she works for can’t afford to both give everyone bonuses and also keep on 17 employees, so if everybody wants to get a bump in pay, somebody’s going to have to get fired, and it’s Sandra’s head on the chopping block—a true problem, because she and her husband depend on her salary in order to pay their rent and feed their kids. When we meet Sandra it’s at the beginning of a weekend where she’s informed that there will be a vote on Monday to decide her fate—bonuses for everyone else or she keeps her job, everyone in the company gets a say, and she only has the weekend to visit each one and convince them to make a personal sacrifice for her well-being. It would be a daunting and awkward task even for someone who wasn’t prone to depression.
That’s an important thing to focus on, because at its heart Two Days, One Night might just be about the struggle of dealing with depression. It’s certainly a matter that ends up getting a lot of focus. Even though the weekend that we’re experiencing alongside Sandra is a particularly dramatic one in her life, an emphasis is put on how hard it is to face adversity while simultaneously feeling fragile thanks to battles with body chemistry, and it’s not hard to imagine how that would also be true during a normal daily routine. During periods of depression even the most mundane of tasks can feel like a mountain that needs to be climbed.
When every ounce of your strength is already dealing with the pain your condition is forcing you to experience, risking something that could make you feel the tiniest amount more becomes unthinkable. When every fiber of your altered being is urging you to embrace solitude and anonymity, even the most casual social encounters can feel like navigating anxiety land mines—which means that walking into unsure social situations involving people you don’t know well is certain death. These are concepts that are easy to understand intellectually, but not easy to truly comprehend on an emotional level if you’ve never experienced chemical depression. What the Dardennes (helped along by Cotillard’s strong performance) manage to do here is force you into a place where you feel what Sandra is feeling, rather than just understand it on an intellectual level.
They’re able to do that thanks to the way that they tell their story. The way Sandra’s plan to individually talk to each of her co-workers over the course of her weekend is presented to us is in a very deliberately paced and step by step manner. Whereas most movies like this would handle her visits to her fellow employees by making a montage sequence where we see snippets of her talking to each person as some sort of song plays—which would then segue into some sort of overblown and cinematic task she needs to complete in order to convince everyone to come down on her side—the Dardennes force us to watch the entirety of every individual interaction. They’re basically the entire movie. We watch her as she repeatedly knocks on each door, we listen to her as she repeatedly gives everyone the exact same spiel, and then we sit through the entirety of their responses. All of that repetition is quite repetitive, and thanks to the number of people she has to talk to, making it to the end can feel like quite the daunting task, but that’s exactly the point. Because we’re forced to sit with her in all of these uncomfortable moments in what’s essentially real time, without the benefit of cutting away, we feel all of the awkwardness and shame of what she’s doing right alongside her. We can understand how difficult this is for her because it’s hard enough for us to even just watch it as a detached observer—which makes it almost impossible not to experience the third act of the film through the lens of quite a lot of empathy.
And thanks to the varying responses these other employees (who are made up of an extensive list of strong actors with authentic faces) have to Sandra’s request, which stem from their different demeanors and the different places their lives are currently in, Two Days, One Night manages to be a movie that’s not just about the Sandra character, and not just about depression, but also class struggles and the hardships of day to day existence that everyone who isn’t a member of the ruling class shares. People on strict budgets are forced to live much more compromised lives than those who are financially comfortable. If there’s a fundamental question that each one of these characters is forced to face, it’s at what point trying to get yourself ahead also becomes trying to push somebody else down, and what our moral responsibilities are when we’ve crossed that line. It’s an intriguing question that provides plenty of opportunity for the Dardennes to explore the dark, self-centered side of man, as they’re wont to do.
All of this talk about struggle and darkness might have given the impression that watching Two Days, One Night is an unpleasant experience, which isn’t the case though. Actually, it manages to find enough moments of humor and light in all of the pain and darkness to make this one of the least depressing Dardenne brothers movies I’ve seen to date—or at least it’s enough to keep you from feeling like spending time with these characters is a draining experience. Honestly, without getting to the point where it feels phony or Hollywood, the ending of this film manages to avoid being a bummer almost completely. It feels honest and appropriate, but still hopeful enough that you can walk out of the theater being a little bit inspired. That’s pretty good for a Dardennes movie. Many of the characters they’ve created in the past haven’t fared so well. Which means that Two Days, One Night could serve as a pretty decent entry point into the Dardennes catalogue for anyone new to their work, so long as they bring a pinch of patience to the party.
