Dardenne & Dardenne: Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Two Days, One Night) (2014)

On the face of it, Two Days, One Night is one of the Dardennes’ gentlest offerings. Like Rosetta, it’s about a factory worker who is made redundant at the worst possible time. Like Rosetta, too, it pretty much treats its protagonist as an avatar, following Sandra (Marion Cotillard) over a single weekend, as she reaches out to her coworkers and tries to convince them to give up their bonuses in exchange for her being rehired. As that might suggest, it’s also one of the most periptatetic and panoramic of the Dardennes’ films – most of it is spent travelling, or on public transport - opening up a wider cross-section of their native Seraing than any of their previous efforts. Yet that very scope is simultaneously what makes such a strong break with Rosetta and the Dardennes' other, earlier works. In those films, Seraing felt too cosmic and overwhelming to be conceptualised in any coherent way - it was more like a heightened gravitational field than a discrete location, a disruption in the Fordist space-time continuum. By contrast, Two Days, One Night gentrifies Seraing into a more recognisable place, an industrial epicentre made over as a post-industrial drossscape. And while that might reduce everyone’s risk of crashing to the ground, it also means that there’s less propulsiveness, less of an impetus to the kind of perpetual motion that prevented the Dardennes’ earlier protagonists getting too grounded. For all the time Sandra spends on buses, highways and traffic islands, she can never quite manage to jack into the vast slipstream that  buoyed up and propelled the Dardennes’ earlier films, perhaps explaining why Cotillard’s body and performance are so limp, wilted and depressive – it is like watching someone who’s been living in a wind tunnel all their life step suddenly into a vacuum, shocked by the silence that descends after a barrage of white noise. For the first time in their career, it feels as if the Dardennes' austerity has been absorbed and conquered by a more powerful, bureaucratic austerity, divested of its purification and profundity in the process – these summery visions of Seraing may be the brightest they've ever shot, but, then again, Sandra’s factory manufactures solar panels, harvesting off the brightness as soon as it’s begun.