Begging to get her job back
To say Marion Cotillard is the greatest actress working today - which I've now said - is to loft a ridiculously hyperbolic and unfair assessment up into the ether. There are dozens of great actresses, known and not so known, young and not so young, old and not so old, fortunate enough and smart enough to collaborate with writers and directors who have something to say.
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-pmn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/GJUWM43K6NBZRJIJJOLBPR7CBM.jpg)
To say Marion Cotillard is the greatest actress working today - which I've now said - is to loft a ridiculously hyperbolic and unfair assessment up into the ether. There are dozens of great actresses, known and not so known, young and not so young, old and not so old, fortunate enough and smart enough to collaborate with writers and directors who have something to say.
Still, think of Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, a metamorphosis that won her the Oscar in 2008. Think of her in Rust & Bone as a whale-trainer-turned-double-amputee who has to decide whether to live or die. Her portrayal last year in The Immigrant - a penniless Pole in 1920s New York pushed into prostitution (and putting up with the burlesque-hall Svengali played by Joaquin Phoenix) - was haunted and heartbreaking.
Here Cotillard is again, downing bottles of water and fistfuls of Xanax, with Belgian filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, purveyors of kitchen-sink dramas, social realism, the hard lives of the working class. In Two Days, One Night, the actress who can be as glamorous as they come (watch her acrobatic, elegantly oddball music video for Dior, "Snapshot in LA") has no trouble diving into the role of the decidedly unglamorous, increasingly desperate Sandra.
A worker at a small solar panel factory in Liege (the Dardennes' hometown), she has long been on sick leave, and management has decided it can do without her. The place runs fine, and Sandra's coworkers have been promised a sizable bonus. But they've also been presented with an eleventh-hour decision: They can forgo their bonuses and vote for Sandra's reinstatement.
Two Days, One Night takes place over a single, stressful weekend, with a fragile and trembling Sandra - she's been suffering from depression - encouraged by a friend (Catherine Salée) and egged on by her husband (Fabio Rongione) to visit her colleagues and essentially go begging for her job.
It's humiliating. The people with whom she has stood side by side at the plant must now look her in the eye and say, No, thank you, I'd rather have the money, if that's how they feel. As Sandra drives and walks and buses around town, knocking on doors, the film becomes an almost biblical parable about compassion, about community, about courage.
Every time Cotillard rings a doorbell, or speaks into a lobby intercom, or encounters a colleague at his second job, or in a laundromat, or coaching a soccer match, the suspense builds.
The Dardennes are aces at these small-scale human dramas, and Two Days, One Night is almost without flaw, save for a hospital visit that asks us to believe in a person's extraordinary recuperative powers, and in a national health system that operates with the nimble efficiency of a dance company.
But as a mother, a wife, a worker whose hold on life has become both fiscally and psychologically tenuous, Cotillard - nominated again for an Academy Award - is so inside her character the actress disappears. There is only this woman, Sandra. What will become of her?
Two Days, One Night ***1/2 (Out of four stars)
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. With Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Catherine Salée. In French with subtitles. Distributed by IFC Films.
Running time: 1 hour, 35 mins.
Parent's guide: PG-13 (drugs, profanity, adult themes).
Playing at: Ritz Five. EndText
215-854-5629
@Steven_Rea