Two Days, One Night is the first film I’ve watched by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, a duo of brother-directors from Belgium of some renown. With Marion Cotillard in the leading role, it has serious acting power behind it as well. It duly went on to do well on the international awards circuit, which was why I added it to my ever growing watch-list.

Cotillard stars as Sandra, a young working mother whose boss presents her with an unenviable dilemma. Due to financial difficulties, the company has asked her colleagues to vote to either let Sandra keep her job or eliminate her position and use the savings to pay for a bonus to be distributed to all of the remaining staff. Urged on by her husband who is worried that without her salary the couple will find it impossible to meet their mortgage payments, she needs to spend the weekend begging each of her colleagues to vote in her favor. Her problems are further compounded as the audience eventually realize that she has been absent from work for an indeterminate period of time due to a nervous breakdown.

It’s a grounded and solidly made film but I must confess that it felt underwhelming and oddly unambitious. As my wife noted, there’s some merit in its theme of searching for basic human dignity, a message that it conveys with surprising subtlety. Less subtly, it’s also a condemnation of how capitalism sets people at odds with one another. It’s already humiliating enough that Sandra has to beg from her colleagues, it’s doubly so when she knows that doing so can destroy relationships between colleagues and even within families. Apart from that, I rather liked how we see a diverse cross section of the people who make up Belgium’s population as she travels to meet each of her colleagues.

But all these nice bits can’t hide the fact that it’s built around what feels like a very small idea. This is compounded by how repetitive it is. Every time Sandra meets with one of her colleagues she launches into what is essentially the same spiel. There’s some variety in their reactions but omnipresent throughout is the undercurrent of embarrassment and awkwardness. I’m also unconvinced that forcing someone to action, as Sandra’s husband does to her here to the extent that he comes across as a bit of a dick, is the best way to help someone who has just gone through a nervous breakdown and possibly depression. That this ultimately ends up working at the end of the film feels like oversimplifying the difficulty and patience needed to deal with mental issues.

Though this is unintentional on the part of the directors, the most interesting thing about this film for me may be that it reveals how different our attitudes are towards work. The characters in this film behave as if losing a job were the end of the world whereas in the more dynamic economies of Asia, it’s hard to imagine anyone staying in the same job for very long and consequently being terribly attached to any single position. It’s unthinkable too that a boss in Asia would force employees to vote in this manner, both because of the devastating consequences to employee morale it would cause and because it would suggest that there is some democratic component to how companies are run, a definite no-no here.

This means that I found this to be a disappointing watch given the big names involved in this production. It doesn’t make any mistakes and it”s easy to admit that this is competently made but there just doesn’t seem to be enough substance here to like..