Directed by
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
On a Friday afternoon, Sandra is lying
in her bed when her cell phone rings. On
the other line is Juliette, her friend and co-worker, who solemnly informs Sandra
that she has been fired from her job at the solar panel manufacturing plant
where they both work. But there’s a
catch: Sandra wasn’t simply fired by her superiors. She was voted out by her co-workers, who were
given the choice of either choosing to retain Sandra’s job, or each accepting a
one-time 1,000-euro bonus. Nearly all of them chose the
bonus. Sandra and Juliette decide to
immediately confront their boss and demand a revote – this time, a blind ballot
scheduled for Monday morning.
That is the set-up for Two Days, One Night, the masterful new
film by the Dardenne Brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc) who, like Robert Bresson,
are capable of conveying tremendous emotion and lyricism without the assistance
of special effects, music, or eloquent dialogue. Their subjects are ordinary people, usually
employed in blue-collar jobs like industrial plants or factory assembly lines,
who face critical moral and ethical decisions in compressed periods of
time. This time, the crucial decision
isn’t faced by Sandra, but by her 18 coworkers who each must decide whether to
take the money or save Sandra’s job.
Sandra must decide how she will plead her case when she personally pays each
of them a visit over the course of the weekend.
Call it 12 Angry Underpaid Men.
The premise for this story sounds
simpler than it actually is. Sandra
(played in a remarkable performance by Marion Cotillard) hasn’t just been
missing work – she suffers from manic depression and could possibly be addicted
to anti-depressants. Had her depression
been affecting her work in an adverse way?
Why had she been away from work for so long? Perhaps more importantly, how aware are
Sandra’s co-workers and bosses in regard to her mental and emotional
instability? These questions are never
fully answered, although we do learn early on that the plant’s foreman
Jean-Marc (played in brief appearances by the Dardennes’ favorite actor,
Olivier Gourmet) has taken a disliking to her, and opined his fellow employees
to accept the bonuses.
Another complicating factor is
Sandra’s family. She is married to Manu
(Fabrizio Rongione), who works as a chef at a local restaurant, and has two
pre-adolescent children. While Manu is a
supportive and loyal spouse, it appears that Sandra is the family’s main
breadwinner. If Sandra loses her job,
all hell could break loose. If Sandra
keeps her job, her 18 co-workers will be denied the bonuses they were promised,
and will be forced to face the scapegoat on a daily basis. And while Sandra and her family are by no
means affluent, they certainly seem better off than many of the plant’s other
workers – some of whom have to take second jobs on the weekends or rely on
their own spouses for additional income (Juliette’s husband is apparently a
successful mechanic, which in the eyes of Jean-Marc and his posse, constitutes hypocrisy
when Juliette comes to the aid of Sandra).
In the background, the not-so-subtle
undercurrent of Two Days, One Night is
the ugly specter of capitalism, which at best engenders competition and rivalry
between coworkers and at worst, leads to dehumanization, aggression, and the
loss of self-worth. At first, the
decision to fire Sandra or preserve the bonuses feels like an unusually cruel
and vicious one, but as the movie goes along, it becomes clear that the
employees are given little, if any, agency or free will in the day-to-day
business of Mitch and Murray Solwal Manufacturing. Even
the term “free will” isn’t really accurate, since Jean-Marc is eager to let his
workers know that there will be long-term repercussions for those who don’t take
his position. In this sense, the 16
co-workers who voted for Sandra’s removal are not really to blame, and as she
visits with them face to face over the course of the two days in the film,
their sympathy for her appears heartfelt and genuine – even the ones who can
hardly bear to tell Sandra that unfortunately, they cannot afford to give up
their bonus.
There
is also an undeniable component of gender discrimination here too. Had Sandra been a man, would her job have
been subjected to the same degree of public scrutiny and cruelty by her
superiors? Is it not true that as a
woman, Sandra’s ability to earn a living was judged as less important than that
of her male counterparts? There is a
reason that statistically women earn 77 cents to every dollar a man makes (U.S.
figures), and that reason is not that women somehow intrinsically deserve less
money, or are too submissive to ask for a raise. The reason is because capitalism is
reinforced by male CEOs and male supervisors and predominantly male politicians
who believe that corporations can have a say in how policy is shaped, but not
women and especially not women who earn low wages. Some of the most unsettling sequences in Two Days, One Night occur when Sandra
enlists the support of her female co-workers, one of whom seems sympathetic at
first, but when her husband explodes in rage at the prospect of valuing
friendship over monetary gain, she is forced to keep her mouth shut.
Earlier,
I mentioned that capitalism leads to a loss in self-worth, which is another
major recurring theme in Two Days, One
Night. Already battling severe depression,
Sandra understandably asks the question of whether her life is more important
than the 18 others she will be adversely affecting should she keep her
job. When she visits her co-workers,
many of them are accompanied by their own young children; in one revealing moment,
a father tells his young son to walk home so he does not have to witness him
face Sandra and tell her that he cannot lend his support. The worthlessness is not only felt by Sandra,
but by one coworker who is brutally mauled
when he sympathizes with her, and another who breaks down into tears when he
painfully admits that he moved away from God and voted for his bonus on
Friday.
Because
after all, what is the right thing to
do? Juliette is certainly a close friend
of Sandra’s, but for the others who do not know her as well, what difference
does one expendable co-worker’s livelihood make (especially when it is
explained by Sandra’s boss that during her prolonged absence, the company realized
her job was an essentially unnecessary one to fill)? In a perfect world, the right thing to do
would be for Sandra to stand up on a table and hold a “UNION” sign while everyone
walks out in solidarity. But the
Dardennes know that such a world does not exist. The management at Solwal may be completely
unscrupulous, but they’re also a byproduct of a larger bureaucratic chain of command
systematically suppressing oppositional voices.
Sandra is hardly a model revolutionary – she can barely stay awake for
extended periods of time, and is always scrambling to find a quick pair of
Zoloft to pop.
There
may be an inevitable sense that Two Days,
One Night is socialist agitprop – the kind that Georg Dreyman probably
would have written for the 25th anniversary celebration of the
GDR. But somehow, the Dardennes (who themselves
must be applauded for rebuffing the lure of the quick Hollywood buck) succeed
in positioning the movie less as politically radical and more as a complex
character study of a deeply torn individual who, perhaps on the heels of joining
the Marxist front, must first determine if her own life is worth advocating
for. Of course, the sordid irony is that
in the event of Sandra’s pleas proving successful, her allies will have done
nothing but jeopardize their own financial and vocational security in the
end. It’s not unlike Newton’s Third Law,
the one about every action having an equal and opposite reaction. But as the penultimate showdown between
Sandra and her boss demonstrates (a showdown where politicking is coolly commended
and rewarded), loyalty and self-worth are personal commodities that have no
price tag.
Rating: 4 stars
