Two Days, One Night (2014)

The Dardenne brothers make movies that register a moral urgency. Their films tell stories that are a matter of life and death and this existential depth is rendered in a style that manages to be cinematic and 'realistic', realism never being degraded into a flawed or programmatic ideas about what social reality is like. Their film attend to what is real in a moral sense. The moral always has a primary position in their films. What characterizes their work and what Two Days, One Night really substantiates is a care for the characters expressed in the Dardennes' singular prowess of hinting at the complexity of a lived life.

The film starts with a dilemma. Sandra, who works in a solar cell plant, learns that her colleagues have voted about whether they are to give up the yearly bonus of € 1000, or whether they are to accept the bonus which would mean that Sandra is to be made redundant. The colleagues voted in favor of the bonus. Sandra's colleague urges their boss to re-arrange the voting next Monday, as the employees were given some information that biased their votes. The colleague encourages Sandra to contact the others who are to vote, and ask them not to vote in favor of the bonus. A journey of hope and humiliation ensues, as Sandra is visiting her colleagues, trying to convince them that she really needs to keep her job, even though she of course understands that they would like to keep the bonus. The Dardennes skillfully capture the variety of responses Sandra gets. The camera sticks close to Sandra, whose bodily presence is made painfully vivid. We see her nervousness, her tics and her oscillation between hope and despair. We learn that she has suffered from depression for some time, and now her husband is trying to stand by her side and to go through with visiting the colleagues.

The strain of the situation for everybody involved is perhaps what I found most engaging in this movie. The structural aspects of having a job and making a living is presented through the myriad of life situations people inhabit, with all it may implicate: having a loan to pay off, having a family to support, saving money for the kids' college education. But the structural is interspersed with the existential. Sandra encounters greed and people who are so ashamed of their clining to the bonus that they are not willing to talk to her. Sheepishly or rudely, they recoil. She also meets people who understand her and who make sacrifices so that Sandra can keep her position at the plant.

The cinematic brilliance of all this is that the viewer never knows beforehand what kind of response she will get. We follow her from door to door and every encounter reveals one human possibility, and the next one reveals another one. The emotional tensions within Sandra are coupled with the tensions of the encounter, and as we reach the end, one could say that the film celebrates the openness of such encounters. The structural tensions are not resolved, but they are actively dealt with and questioned by people who care about each other.