Less Is More With 'Two Days, One Night'

Sometimes a foreign film’s wider distribution hinges on whether or not it garners any Academy Awards nominations. "Two Days, One Night" (opening Jan. 30 at Landmark's La Jolla Village Theatres) just secured a best actress nomination and is now finally opening in San Diego. It was worth the wait.

Imagine this scenario: your co-workers have just voted to have you laid off so that each of them can claim a $1000 bonus. That’s the reality Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a young Belgian woman, wakes up to one morning. But her friend, who felt that employees were unfairly pressured by their supervisor to vote for Sandra's layoff, convinces the company to hold a second vote by secret ballot. Now Sandra has the humiliating task of spending a long weekend asking each co-worker for her job back. And if that’s not bad enough, she has to do it after having just been treated for debilitating depression.

Her initial response is to crawl into bed and give up. She has been out on sick leave coping with depression and does not relish the thought of having to seek each co-worker out and trying to change their vote. But her husband convinces her to make the effort. He seems motivated not just by the fact that their family need her salary to survive but also because we sense that he just wants her to put up a fight rather than withdraw back into her depression.

Her first encounter proves deceptively easy and results in one person changing his vote. But later encounters end up stirring violent reactions."Two Days, One Night" has a repetitiveness built in as Sandra repeats her pitch to each person. Initially this felt annoying as the exact same dialogue was repeated in each new scene with her fellow workers. But just as we get lulled into the predictability, filmmakers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne make us realize that the story is not just about Sandra. We become interested in what the different responses reveal about each of the characters and about the distasteful practices of the company she works for. Her co-workers provide a cross section of people and attitudes. Some Sandra cannot fault for voting for a raise because they, like her, need the money. But others are more selfish or felt threatened by their supervisor to vote for the raise. As the film progresses, it offers a strong commentary about workplace practices that look solely at the bottom line and treat employees like interchangeable widgets.

The film';s strength lies in its graceful restraint. Marion Cotillard’s quiet, nuanced performance and the film's understated tone build to a surprisingly effective end. Hollywood would have hammered the emotional points home with heavy music cues and turned Sandra's efforts into a heroic cause along the lines of "Norma Rae" or "Erin Brockovich." But instead, "two Days, One Night" takes a more matter-of-fact approach. It suggests that battles such as Sandra's get fought everyday in different ways by ordinary people and no one ever notices. So while we admire Sandra for what she does, the film's poignancy and power come from the fact that everything is treated so plainly and naturalistically.

"Two Days, One Night" (rated PG-13 for some mature thematic elements, and in French and Arabic with English subtitles) shows that less can be more, and that restraint be compelling.