Sublime Acting And an Unexpected High

At the start of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s film “Two Days, One Night,” Sandra (Marion Cotillard) receives a call from a friend at the small Belgian solar panel factory where she works. Her co-workers have accepted their manager’s proposal that if they vote to let her be fired, their annual several-thousand Euro bonuses will be protected. 

No firing, no bonuses.

Sandra has been on extended medical leave for clinical depression, and both the manager and other workers have noticed that 16 have been doing the work of 17 with minimal overtime. Fueled by false notions of becoming more competitive with Chinese rivals, the manager (Baptiste Sornin) has put her job to a vote. When Sandra protests, he agrees to a revote on Monday morning, Sandra’s first day back from leave.

Sandra and her husband, Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), realize that Sandra must visit each of her colleagues pleading for their support to let her keep her job. Without it they will lose their apartment and have to return to public housing. And so begins the long, suspenseful weekend of the title, the two days and one night.

If this sounds contrived, the Dardennes based it on a news story from France several years ago. It provides the perfect basis for the brothers, who made “The Kid with the Bike,” to fashion another social-realist film with a huge beating heart and strict moral rigor.

Sandra’s spiel to each co-worker always starts the same way — and we can see her exhaustion grow as the weekend passes — but with wildly varying responses. One coworker starts a fight with his father, another breaks down in tears, a third makes a major life decision that has been coming a long time. Everyone of them needs the bonus money; some are even working second, off-the-books jobs for cash.

Cotillard, the first major star to have worked with the Dardennes, is superb. She is the current face of Dior — you see her in magazine and newspaper ads — but Cotillard works without makeup here, her clothes only jeans and a tank top. As her emotions ebb and flow, she registers them in small flickers, never blazes. As a portrayal of depression, this is an accurate portrayal: Sandra bows her head, doesn’t eat, swallows Xanax reflexively. Sometimes she seems to be sleepwalking; sometimes she’s on the verge of giving up, sometimes edging near suicide even. (Perhaps Cotillard’s exhaustion was real: She has said the Dardennes took as many as 80 takes of a single scene.)

At one point, a relief from the tension of visiting colleagues on the first day, Sandra tenderly makes her children’s beds with relief and peacefulness. The scene ends when her face in a mirror reflects the same cosmic loneliness last seen in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity.” Yet she is not alone; her husband is with her, and her young son and daughter help look up her colleagues’ addresses over Saturday breakfast.

The film ends with a typical Dardenne twist — Sandra is presented with her own moral dilemma at work — and, perhaps surprisingly, ends on an optimistic, if unexpected, high. But even that exhilarating moment depends on Cotillard’s sublime performance. She has already won many best actress awards for this role, and it is no wonder she is nominated for an Academy Award. She is superb.

“Two Days, One Night” is rated PG-13 for thematic elements. It has been released nationally and will soon be playing in our area.