Deux jours, une nuit

This is my first Dardenne Bros film and at the end of this film I was like "I need to explore more of their films". This is a hard hitting slow story. It could be described as monotonous, but I would describe it as very very real. Following Marion's character, Sandra (la performance c'est très magnifique), we see the hardship of how a series of simple tasks turns into the hardest thing she has to do over the Two days and one night.

The Dardenne Bros and the Cinematographer Alain Marcoen used long shots, with very little cuts in certain scenes. At times whole scenes were just one shot. This left Sandra and Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) to hold the screen and make us believe what is going on and they did a great job with this. It allowed me to get into their emotions and into their lives of what they were going through. The lack of soundtrack also added that extra realism into the story.

I found this a heart wrenching and at times victorious film - a very good balance. The flow was great. It is slow, but just like Sofia Coppolo's Lost in Translation the slow-moving pace is necessary to tell the story.

I was able to get a ticket to this film at Festival de Cannes and it was received very well by the audience around us.

I'm off, now, to watch some more Dardenne Bros films!

This French-language film is both written and directed by brothers Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne and set in their native Wallonia part of Belgium, poorer than the Flemish north of the country and hard hit by the post-2008 recession. It is the complete antithesis of the Hollywood movie: slow and deliberate with no special effects or action sequences.

A small company has a vote of its workforce which decides that it would rather all the staff receive a bonus than take back a female colleague who wishes to return to work after a bout of depression. The woman at the heart of this moral dilemma is Sandra, played by the talented French actress Marion Cotillard, who has just a weekend to persuade her colleagues to change their mind. Essentially this is a film about solidarity - or lack of it - not just in the workplace but also at home and shows how different factors influence our decisions and how those decisions have consequences for ourselves and for others.

The heart of this film does not lie in the simple plot, but in the portrayal of a woman, and her family, struggling with depression and the prospect of losing everything.

After coming out the other side of an apparently lengthy battle with depression, Sandra (Cotillard) faces the prospect of losing her job if she cannot convince the majority of her colleagues to forgo a €1,000 bonus in favour of her staying with the company. One by one, she reaches out the her co-workers in the hope that she can convince them to vote for her to stay. On the whole, it is not these interactions that steal the show, but Sandra's own personal struggles with having to ask. The guilt she feels, pleading with people to give up money that most of them desperately need in order for her to keep a job she's not been at for months, coupled with her on-going struggles with depression and her own demons. Cotillard's performance is exceptional throughout, her frustration and upset so believable that it's easy to forget that this an actress playing a role. Anyone who has been affected by depression, either personally or indirectly, will find large portions of the film relatable and harrowing.

A strong supporting cast and a truly moving script complete this understated gem of a movie.

It's as low key and quiet as a film can get. It's not enhanced for comedy, action, or drama. Just a realistic human story of the basic struggle to make ends meet in this world.

It's the type of movie that separates the movie geeks from the film geeks.

As a film geek, I can appreciate how the filmmakers did so much with so little, especially actress,Marion Cotillard.

The movie counts on her being realistic, all the way down to the weight it looks like she lost in order to play a woman who just got over an illness, and in order to get her job back spends a weekend visiting her coworkers in order to convenience them to vote for her to get her job back in a secret ballet on Monday, over a big bonus they would all get if she stays laid-off. She had to be believable as a proud woman who did not want to ask her coworkers of this, she did not want their pity, but she needed to support her family, a situation all of her coworkers are also in. It's a truly unbalanced and unfair situation for everyone and Marion did an excellent job portraying how uncomfortable that is.

As a movie geek, though the movie was watered down with absolutely no sugar, I'm glad it was not boring. It helps that the subject is something almost everyone who has a job in this economy can relate to, no matter which side of the equation you're on.

Definitely the type of picture we'll all be discussing long after the film is over. '

Imagine trying to recover from depression only to discover that your illness was in danger of costing you your job; or worse, that in your absence your boss had asked your colleagues to vote for retaining you, or receiving their annual bonus. Imagine then having to visit those colleagues and beg them not to vote for you to lose your livelihood. This is the grim scenario for the Dardenne brothers' film 'Two Days, One Night', whose strength lies in the fact that nothing is presented in an overly melodramatic fashion: it's a simple, hard story of people doing what they have to do, as best as they are able. In a a way, it's also the film's weakness: in a moment of inner despair, the lead character overdoses, but it's so internalised that the incident is strangely quiet and unremarkable. But overall, the film is a telling exploration of the scope, and limits, of human solidarity; and the ending is a nice mixture of the positive and the realistic.