Review of Two Days, One Night (2014) by Mostafa A — 21 Jan 2015

As she is preparing to return to work, Sandra(Marion Cotillard) receives the devastating news from her friend Juliette(Catherine Salee) that her co-workers voted 14-2 in favor of retaining their annual 1,000 euro bonuses over her coming back. With help from her friend, Sandra gets their boss(Baptiste Sornin) to reschedule a new vote on Monday with information that the original vote was unduly influenced. That gives Sandra the weekend to meet with her co-workers.

Of all the filmmakers that could conceivably botch such a simple and elegant set-up as the above, somewhere at the bottom of your list should be the usually excellent Dardenne Brothers. However, somehow with "Two Days, One Night," they come awfully close, even with Marion Cotillard, who is fine, on hand. Instead of their usual social realist approach which has always worked so well in the past, they go soft and sentimental, filling the movie with sob stories whose sincerity are impossible to accurately gauge, instead of using the encounters to form a narrative of past actions. And that's not to mention the movie's cavalier treatment of depression, where the message is that if Sandra can't fight for herself, why should others?(At least, there is the inference that Sandra is returning to work too soon.) Plus, the ending has problems of its own.