Movie review: Two days, one night

Marion Cotillard's acting is wonderful.

Cast: Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione
Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Running time: 95 mins
Rating: M (low-level violence) In French with English subtitles

Verdict: Mastery in a minor key

Twice garlanded with Cannes' Palme d'Or, the Belgian brothers who are Europe's modern masters of naturalism lost this year to Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep. But they bring the same humane politically focused sensibility to bear on their latest deceptively simple drama.

Casting for the first time from the A-list (Cotillard, who won an Oscar for playing Edith Piaf, is France's biggest star these days), they tell a story located firmly on the wrong side of the tracks.

It's set and shot in a small Belgian town - Seraing, the Dardennes' home town and preferred location. Here, after an absence that is only slowly explained, Sandra returns to her job at a solar panel factory to discover the boss has pulled a swifty: he's persuaded the rest of the 16 staff that they can carry her workload and offered them a hefty bonus if they do so.

Sandra has the weekend - the title's ticking clock - to persuade her colleagues to vote to give her her job back, a task she embarks on with the help of her devoted chef husband Manu (Rongione).

From such modest material a minor-key masterpiece is made. The film exists within a dense political context of course, about the worldwide casualisation of labour that sets worker against worker, about the destruction of any sense of neighbourhood or community that goes with that.

But typically, the Dardennes keep the focus intimate and personal. In essence, this is a film about a woman having a dozen conversations, but each of them introduces us to a character of convincing individuality and tightens the moral and political knot the story has tied. And it plays it dead straight with no manipulative trickery: there's not even any music apart from songs on a car stereo which serve a specific dramatic function.

The film's success relies in large part on Cotillard's wonderful work: in her body language and facial expressions, in the ways she brushes back her hair, she creates a woman of radiant and specific authenticity, who somehow speaks for a billion like her. She's the beating heart of a film that manages to whisper and scream at the same time. Fantastic.

- TimeOut