Critics reviews

As Sandra, a factory employee pleading to her co-workers for her job over the course of a weekend, Marion Cotillard gives a performance composed of seemingly casual miracles, achieving a rare and palpable degree of emotional translucency.

The most masterful film of 2014 was also the quietest... It's hard to imagine any other director with a soft enough touch to keep the material from edging into melodrama, but its that restraint and precision which makes the film so effective. [The Dardennes'] control is matched by that of Cotillard whose performance as Sandra is powerful without overpowering.

The to-and-fro may symbolise the acceptation/rejection of the star system into the texture of the film, yet the question of ambivalence toward the Other is at the core of the Dardenne's cinema... Two Days is built on a suspense that – a first for the directors – winks at genre cinema.

Cotillard is remarkable in the part. It's rare for a star of her magnitude to act for the Dardennes, who generally prefer nonprofessionals and unknowns, but she's impressively shed anything resembling glamour, or affect. We can't take our eyes off her, in part because she feels like she's on a psychic edge, constantly in danger of falling off. This is the most vulnerable performance she's ever given — watching her at times feels like watching an exposed nerve.

With its lean narrative and humanist resolve, Two Days, One Night can be seen as a throwback to the type of Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s, lean morality plays that explore the fluctuations of confidence in characters on the brink of social inconsequence. But this is less Frank Capra than Frank Borzage; the film intensely expresses the physical and emotional cost of fighting for your worth, both within the workplace and at home.

The presence of Cotillard creates a fascinating new subtext: a glamorous star who... has often graced the covers of glossy fashion magazines and, is among the most highly remunerated actors in France finds herself, over and over, forced to beg for help from her vastly less well-known supporting cast. The effect is extraordinary—it is a person we recognize as a "have" forced to do a sort of penance, soliciting aid for herself in the world of the "have-nots."

Each encounter begins with Sandra speaking the same words, yet they end differently, with responses ranging from cold reprobation to violence to tearful gratitude. All are tense, unpredictable, and magnificent.

By structuring the story around a dozen or so personal interactions, the Dardennes are proposing that we cannot make sense of what Sandra is asking apart from the very specific conditions of each particular encounter, such that each time she asks a new person her question, she effectively asks a new question. There actually _is_ no abstract moral dilemma, no general alternative between egoism and altruism. By telling this story in the form of a series, the Dardennes challenge the very idea.

In Two Days, One Night, the perspective is strong and clear: Life can be a constant string of challenges, but what's less vital than succeeding against those hardships is surviving them with dignity intact. It is only when Sandra's perception of the rightness or wrongness of her pursuit wavers that her spirit seeps out... Two Days, One Night's ultimate conclusion is only a downer from the most literal-minded, plot-driven perspective; in every other significant way, it's a profound personal victory.

The Dardenne brothers — known for their scruffy, hand-held, realist aesthetic — have made another richly emotional film about friendship and community. The structure is repetitive, but designed to emphasize all the ways we react to another person in need.

What anchors Two Days, One Night, and eases its gaps, is Cotillard's extraordinary performance. A star presence if ever there was one, the actress must play against not just her looks (which scruffy hair and a lack of makeup can't offset) but her essential vitality.

It's a film that captures humanity at its best and its worst, sometimes simultaneously. Nobody is a hero, though some people act heroically; nobody is a villain, though some people have closed themselves off. Sandra herself is both defeated and persistent, which qualifies as a definition of what it means to be alive, knowing full well that the grave awaits.