swo17 wrote:I recently commented in the '80s list thread about Bresson's
L'Argent, and how it shows the viciousness that we unleash purely by removing ourselves one step from face-to-face communication when we deal with each other instead through paper (i.e. currency, letter writing, bureaucracy). In this sense,
Two Days, One Night is the perfect answer to
L'Argent. Money is the central issue here, but we never see any of it. Instead, we get nothing but one-on-one conversations, allowing for an in-depth exploration of all of the gray areas specific to the particular situation of this film.
Upon first hearing the film's plot, you might assume that this is going to be a root-for-the-underdog-against-the-system sort of story (and there is a little bit of that) but as with many things in life, it's a lot more complicated than that. Some of the people that voted to keep their bonus over keeping Sandra on may have done so out of selfishness, but most of them seem to need the bonus just as badly as she needs her job. Of course, some of these people may only
think they need the money, or may only need it now because they hadn't been as responsible as they could have been with the wages they earned throughout the year. Perhaps this is even true of Sandra. Either way, Sandra needs a job now, sure, but does she need this one? And even if you sympathize with her situation, if you legitimately need the bonus yourself, to what extent do you work against your own interests by cooperating with her mission to contact all of her coworkers over the weekend? There are no easy answers here, and this is just the sort of scenario that the Dardennes excel at presenting.
By coincidence, I happened to precede my viewing of this film with that Mark Wahlberg movie
Fear (mistaking it for domino's recommendation of another film with the same name, despite his always referring to it as the one with Ally Sheedy!). That movie is all about processing extreme swings of new information ("He's a dreamboat," "No wait, he's a brute..." "Oh, but he's sorry about it," "Except also, he's a murderer!") but doesn't exactly shoot for subtlety or authenticity.
Two Days, One Night is strikingly similar in putting its heroine through the ringer in this way, but it unsurprisingly feels a lot more true to life. While it's somewhat predictable that some of the people Sandra encounters throughout the weekend will side with her and that others will side against her, the real substance of the film lies in how she takes each new bit of news--how much of a rush it is to hear that even just a single person is rooting for you, how soul-crushing it is to be taken down a notch (or perhaps worse, to be brushed off by someone that you assumed would be on your side), and more generally, how much of a toll it takes to fight so hard for yourself. Some more in spoilers:
A couple of moments here seemed to play the stakes a little too high (the fist fight, or the woman who leaves her controlling husband--more believably, she probably would have just lied to her husband about how she was going to vote and then blamed it on her coworkers if Sandra got her job back; as it is, it almost feels like this woman is trying to hijack the movie from Sandra) but, curiously enough, the most exaggerated dramatic moment here (the is-she-really-doing-this suicide attempt followed by a miraculous moment of joyous hope that prompts Sandra to instantly confess what she has done, then a hard cut to her recovery bed in the hospital) struck me as one of the film's most successful, and a more darkly comic one than what I've come to expect from the Dardennes. Or actually, I don't know if it was so much comical as it was just such an atrocious turn of events that I couldn't help but laugh at it. In any case, I think this moment may have worked more than the other two I mentioned because the film really commits to it, as opposed to maybe feeling tacked on to add a bit of variety to the numerous necessary visits.
A great ending too. Happiness isn't about getting what you (think you) want, but about standing back up again, with hope, after having been knocked down.
(<---Don't cross this smiley, he has a dark side)
