Two Days, One Night
Deux jours, une nuit

Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make small, naturalistic films about the working class and people living just outside the law in the industrial towns of their native Belgium. Their simple, straightforward, but deeply emotional movies like La promesse (1996), L’Enfant (2005), and The Kid with a Bike (2011) transcend all barriers of language, culture, and status, with their richly drawn characters in intense but keenly identifiable situations. Their latest work, Two Days, One Night, may be not just their best film yet; I think it’s the best picture of 2014.

Though much of the lived-in authenticity of the Dardennes’ movies comes from the casting of non-professional actors, this film stars the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, Rust and Bone, The Immigrant). But the peerless Cotillard instantly merges with the unknown players in this exquisitely realized performance that never comes off like an award-seeking turn by a movie star. Cotillard plays Sandra, a young wife and mother who, upon returning to work after suffering a nervous breakdown, discovers her factory job is in jeopardy.  Rather than spending her first weekend home making a calm transition back into normal family life, she launches a desperate effort to retain her at work.  It’s heartbreaking to watch Sandra suffer the stresses and indignities of having to beg her friends and colleagues to make a personal sacrifice so she can keep her menial job. Yet the sublime Two Days, One Night is not a bleak or depressing picture.

The Dardenne brothers depict a situation that is all too common in today’s social and economic climate. There are no villains in this movie, and no one—not the factory manager, not the families who need to protect their own livelihoods, not the immigrant who fears for his own position, not the self-interested guys who never liked Sandra in the first place—is an ideological straw man or a metaphorical representation of a political viewpoint or societal ill. Yet the overall film functions as a profound commentary on contemporary civilization.

Conservative American viewers might be critical of this picture because the first thing that occurs to Sandra and her husband, upon learning she may lose her income, is that she’ll have to go on the dole—not that she’ll have to go out and find another line of work. But succumb to this knee-jerk reaction and you will miss the entire point of the film.  Sandra and her husband are hardworking individuals who pulled themselves out of public housing and off welfare, but her recent mental breakdown compromised her ability to function in her family and community. In the two days and one night she has to save her job, her focused efforts are not unlike the daily grind most people on welfare face as they attempt to secure gainful employment over a period of months. The heightened, time-limited structure of the narrative dramatically encapsulates the harrowing, demoralizing, and often fruitless nature of the job quest in our current economic reality.

Two Days, One Night tells a harsh, gut-wrenching story that never provides the easy answers of simplistic movie clichés. Yet ultimately this is an overwhelmingly positive film about self-empowerment and emotional recovery that demonstrates how individuals gain strength from community. It’s a rare social-issue picture that actually provides an actionable answer to the massive societal problem it explores. I don’t mean to imply that it gives a complete solution, but it demonstrates something elemental that we in the audience can take away and implement in our daily lives. More than anything else, Two Days, One Night illustrates the power of empathy and simple human kindness.