TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT: Canvassing to Keep Your Job
Sandra Bya (Marion Cotillard) is really, REALLY down. On an early Friday afternoon, she gets a call from a work friend who informs Sandra a majority of her co-workers has decided to kick her out. It seems, after a lengthy absence caused by depression, her boss has realized the work of 17 can actually be done by 16. He proposes a vote. His staff can either vote for Sandra to come back to work on Monday and keep her job, or vote to receive their regular bonus of 1,000 Euros, each. Sandra has been voted out by a landslide. She and her one supporting colleague rush to their boss to ask for a second ballot on Monday. He agrees, and now Sandra must spend her entire weekend asking every one of her colleagues to change their minds.
Holy.
Shit.
Time for some ice cream.
What could be more difficult? Sandra, the primary breadwinner of a couple with two young children, desperately needs her salary to survive, but as she speaks with each workmate, we see they depend on what must be a regular bonus in order to keep their own lives together. No matter what, someone is going to lose. Thanks in part to a perfectly broken performance by Marion Cotillard, I found myself immediately siding with Sandra. These assholes are selfish! How could they do this to her? Well, they could do this to her because they need to do what they feel is best. After all, we are talking about one woman’s job vs. sixteen other people’s financial well-being. Isn’t that just as, if not more, unfair to them? Of course, it isn’t nearly so simple.
Writer/directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have created a rich, thought-provoking, and often punishing story which introduces a new character nearly every five minutes and manages to never feel repetitive. With every new employee reached, Sandra’s hopes and fears are quietly pounding their way through every word of her basically unchanging monologue of supplication. Gripped by the suspense of each character’s response, my anticipation only grew as the movie progressed, because the Dardenne brothers are every bit as interested in telling the rest of the company’s stories as they are in telling that of their protagonist. I don’t dare detail every response her plea receives, but I will say they run one hell of a gamut. By the end, although Sandra has completely won our sympathy, it’s challenging to say which outcome is right.
At this point, there isn’t much more I can say about Marion Cotillard’s masterful performance. She, along with the talent of her co-stars and the film’s extremely natural aesthetics, easily forces the confines of filmmaking; even the edges of the whatever screen we are seeing practically disappear completely. This is an exceptionally simple, and superbly effective work of realist cinema. It is moving, funny (slightly), infuriating, beautiful, and above all, totally human. Although I won’t reveal it here, I also believe the end, a particularly difficult one to create for a story like this, is perfect.
Visually, this might have been a missed opportunity to say more with what we are seeing, but something about watching long takes of a scrawny, hunched, and nervous Cotillard, looking so frail like life has simply started leaving her body; her desperate situation becomes incredibly palpable. You almost start to feel like all YOUR friends at work chose money over you. It’s quite an experience.
