Sandra is about to return to work after being sick for a few months, but she gets the bad news that the company she works for is planning to let her go. Sandra gets stressed out. The only way Sandra can keep her job is to convince her coworkers to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job. She has one weekend to do it.
Blaine: Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne had read fictional books about people losing their jobs and in 2004 they had their own story in mind. The gender of the main character kept changing from girl to boy to girl again. Then the Dardenne brothers met Marion Cotillard in 2007 and they had her in mind for the lead character, so the gender stayed female. Meeting Marion also gave the Dardenne brothers a new idea of how the story should go because the first story they did wasn’t working out. The Dardenne brothers saw Marion Cotillard’s face as something that had this enormous ability to be present, but also look like you assume she is spacing out. Sandra has to visit each one of her co-workers and try to convince them to be on her side because they are the ones deciding whether she should stay or not. The Dardenne brothers knew there had to be a reason for Sandra being laid off from her job. They thought it would be a good idea if Sandra hadn’t been at the company she works at for a few months because she was very ill. That would make it easier for the co-workers to exclude her because they hadn’t seen her in a few months.
The thought of losing her job is too much for Sandra. She works to provide for her family and the job means a lot to her. Sandra can hardly speak and she feels like she doesn’t exist. She also thinks she is weak, but she shows herself that she can be strong. She manages to get two people on her side towards the beginning of her journey and that gives her the strength to keep on going and asking others for help. The only thing Marion Cotillard had to study for the project was Xanax because Sandra takes them from time to time and Marion had to know how it effects someone and their mood. Marion also had to bring Sandra to life through her performance. She had to put herself into the mind of this character and figure out what she is feeling. Sandra expresses herself through her facial expressions and body language than words. She doesn’t want people to see her cry, so she goes to a spot where no one can see her. When she is in front of others she holds it all together. Marion also had to lose her French accent and replace it with a Belgian one because the movie takes place near Liege, Belgium. She spent a month rehearsing with that accent.
The Dardenne brothers wanted someone who would support Sandra and comfort her. It was challenging for them to figure out who would be best to be Sandra’s number one supporter. At first the Dardenne brothers thought it should be a co-worker or someone Sandra meets while she goes around asking her co-workers to help her. But then they thought that would be focussing on something else. So they decided to go with a husband instead. They wanted Sandra and the husband, Manu, to understand each other well enough. He has to be very understanding of what Sandra is going through because he saw how ill she was. Of course Sandra doesn’t need him watching over her all the time, but what she is going through concerns him. Before the script was finished, the Dardenne brothers had Fabrizo Rongione in mind for Manu. They worked with Fabrizo years before on a film called “Rosetta”. He was still a student in acting at the time, but he has had a lot of experience ever since then and the Dardenne brothers had been keeping an eye on him. They felt Fabrizo could do it.
There were a few challenges for this project and another one for the Dardenne brothers was figuring out what kind of company Sandra would have worked for. It needed to be a company with fewer than 50 workers. Solwal, a small solar-panel factory, was suffering. It was the start of the crises, partly due to the Chinese market. The Chinese made cheaper products. There are solar panel manufacturers in France, so the Dardenne brothers decided to go with that.
Another challenge was finding an ensemble of actors that would surround Marion Cotillard. Some of the people who were apart of the ensemble were still in acting school. Four of them had never acted in front of a camera before and the others who were apart of the ensemble didn’t have any acting experience because they weren’t actors. The Dardenne brothers believe that rehearsing helps an actor find the character they are playing. Another thing that is important to the Dardenne brothers is during rehearsal you have to figure out what position the camera is going to be in when focussing on the actors. Like the camera has to follow Marion Cotillard as she is walking to someone’s house and then it has to be focussing on whom ever is in the shot with her. Like there’s a scene where one of the co-workers tries to stop this angry dude as he is yelling at Sandra’s face. Sandra gets hit in the head, falls back and she is out of the shot and then it just focusses on the two guys fighting. Some of the co-workers Sandra meets with have second jobs. Their lives are just as important as Sandra’s.
Marion would smile while they were shooting a scene and the Dardenne brothers didn’t ask her to do that. It was something she felt went with the scene they were shooting. Sandra and Manu are taking a drive and music is playing. Manu feels it could be bothering Sandra, but it’s what she needs at the moment and so she turns the radio up a bit and smiles.
While having the film put together in the editing room, the Dardenne brothers were amazed at the footage they were watching of Marion Cotillard’s performance even though they saw her act while they were shooting, but still her performance was breathtaking for them. Marion put a lot into her performance. At the end of the film Sandra loses her job, but she changes and becomes a new person. Sandra accepts being let go and she knows she did everything she could to keep her job. And she also appreciates that the co-workers who were on her side did what they could to help. Sandra does get offered her job back because her former boss was amazed that she was able to convince a lot of the employees to support her. From the looks of it Sandra feels things are going to be alright. Who knows she could find another job and still be able to provide for the family. The Dardenne brothers almost ended the movie with something dramatic, but then they thought that would be too cruel. People who have seen “Two Days, One Night" told the Dardenne brothers that it is horrible of what Sandra had to go through, but she managed to stay strong and ask each coworker to help her. My dad said he likes “Two Days, One Night” because this type of situation can really happen in real life.
My rating on “Two Days, One Night” is five out of five stars
