A French film (with subtitles), but not nominated as Best Foreign film, Two Days, One Night came on my radar through its fantastic performance by its lead actress, Marion Cotillard. Cotillard has the nomination for Best Actress (some say taking the spot otherwise that would have gone to Jennifer Aniston for Cake), and Cotillard, as she has in everything she’s done, brings a fierce realism to this role, a role that shines with hope and sweats with despair, all perfectly as should be portrayed in the movie.
But the movie itself doesn’t climb far enough out of what I expected from the story to garner an excellent rating. Don’t get me wrong: the story is a fascinating and painful tale of workers trying to survive in a difficult economy that finds corporations focusing on profits and not people. The story does a wonderful job too of pointing out the painful measures those in power will go to in order to separate the masses to achieve goals of the bottom line. But even as incredibly heartbreakingly a realistic societal commentary the movie is, it’s just too flat and predictable for me.
Nothing surprised me in the film. Nothing caught me off guard. Nothing twisted or veered sharply or caught me up in the tale. Instead, I felt like I watched play out exactly what I expected once the storyline was set up. And that was too bad. Yes, they tried once to take a surprising twist, but that arc of the story was too brief and too glossed over to really speak to me, especially given the timeline of the tale playing out on the screen of two days and one night. In hindsight, that’s probably what left me sitting not at five stars here, but four.
Again, all of that said, it’s good. And the film speaks volumes. And Cotillard shines.