Deux jours, une nuit

You absolutely will be disappointed if you are looking for a "robot fighting robot" movie or anything superficial, or beautiful woman. (Well no one can say Cottilard is not beautiful, but she deliberately gives up her beauty to fit the character.)

This movie shows us what real emotions is. It reveals life in such a vivid and convincing way that you'll think about your own life, although you may be a lot better off than the characters.

After all this movie is a feast of fine acting, a reason that movies are still called art, and a spirit lifting experience that is going to linger on for a long time after you finish it.

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!

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.

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.

"A woman is like a tea bag – you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water." - Eleanor Roosevelt

How many of us would fight as hard as Sandra (Marion Cotillard) to keep her job? I suppose we would try to keep it, but she has to convince a majority out of 16 fellow workers to vote her employment rather than their 1000 Euros bonuses. She journeys in this intense film like some mythical mariner to each island person to convince that they should vote for her.

Not only does Sandra experience a heavy dose of humiliation by virtually begging to be kept as an employee, she also has to deal with her insecurity and the accompanying dependence on drugs to help her through this challenge and her recent depression. The film's limitation is the repetition for each co-worker she visits, as if they just repeat the script for each visit. Even when one segment turns violent, it's as if writer/directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne injected action in an otherwise flat line of activity. Overall, the Dardennes further their thematic interest in socialistic causes.

What elevates this drama into Oscar consideration is Cotillard, dressed not like a movie star (see La Vie en Rose and Midnight in Paris) but a working girl, little makeup accompanied by sleeveless tees and serviceable jeans. Make no mistake; she still is one of the world's most attractive actresses, my current fav. However, here she is believable as a vulnerable mother grasping for her job that the family desperately needs to survive.

Yes, although she has a contributing husband, Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), he is unusually supportive, almost to a fault. Yet, dramatically, he's positioned well to keep her in the forefront. She's not Sally Field's Norma Rae, who fights for a union in her textile mill, because Sandra's cause is personal in the 21st century, where Norma's in the '70's is about collectivism. Both women, however, have an intelligence and wit to get them through. As far as I'm concerned, that's part of what feminism is about.