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A very good article on the filmmaking brothers whose new film I reviewed
for CounterPunch last week:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/26/the-existential-crisis-of-work/
NY Times, Oct. 4 2014
Specializing in Ordinary Ordeals
The Dardennes Explore Their Theme in ‘Two Days, One Night’
By A. O. SCOTT
Telluride, Colo. — Wage stagnation, income inequality, the living wage,
the decline of the middle class: These issues may be pushed out of the
headlines by more dramatic crises, but they continue to preoccupy
political discourse, especially in the United States and Europe. At the
movies, economic injustice is occasionally grist for allegory — as in
Bong Joon-Ho’s “Snowpiercer,” the action-movie sleeper of the summer —
and more frequently an axiom of realism. And for the past 15 years or
so, cinematic realism has been virtually synonymous with the name
Dardenne, as in Jean-Pierre and Luc, Belgian brothers, now 63 and 60,
who have twice won the Palme d’Or in Cannes.
“Two Days, One Night,” their latest film, finds global significance in a
slender, almost anecdotal story about a worker’s ordeal. The same might
be said of any of the brothers’ other major fictional features, which
cast a naturalistic eye on the daily lives of poor and somewhat less
poor residents of Belgium’s French-speaking industrial heartland. The
Dardennes are faithful chroniclers of a European working class in
crisis, and their austere methods have influenced filmmakers from
Argentina to Kazakhstan — wherever problems of labor, subsistence and
economic survival seem especially acute. Which is just about everywhere,
nowadays.
Since the appearance of “La Promesse” in 1996, the brothers have been
the pre-eminent heirs of a battered and durable neorealist tradition,
and they have become known — and in the world of international film
festivals, celebrated — for consistency of style and theme. They shoot
their films in and around Seraing, where they grew up, and cast local
actors, professional and otherwise, along with an occasional French or
Belgian movie star. (Marion Cotillard, with worried eyes and weary
posture and without a trace of actorly vanity, has the lead in “Two
Days.”) There is a typical, often-imitated Dardennes shot: a hand-held
camera following behind a character, whose point of view is both
emphasized and obscured by the framing. And also a typical Dardennes
protagonist: a person in difficult circumstances who is forced to make a
costly, morally wrenching choice.
In a recent interview here — a stop on the festival itinerary that has
taken “Two Days” from Cannes to Toronto to New York, where it screens
Sunday in advance of a Christmas commercial release in the United States
— Luc Dardenne, on this occasion the more talkative brother, summed up
the existential theme of their work. “It may be too simple to put it
this way,” he said, “but all of our films recount how a person emerges
from his or her solitude, and unites with another, or several others.
‘The Son,’ ‘Rosetta,’ ‘La Promesse’: One way or another, we show how
someone encounters somebody else, and how this encounter is
transformative, how it resolves the isolation that had kept the main
character outside of society, outside the community.”
The accuracy of this assessment is plain enough. Even when the plots
take a grim turn, toward unemployment, prison or violence, they never
let go of the possibility of human connection, of the recognition that
affirms an individual’s membership in some larger collective identity: a
couple, a family, a team, a class, the human species.
Though Luc described this idea in abstract, almost philosophical terms,
it has a clear ethical and even political dimension. In “La Promesse,” a
boy is torn between loyalty to his father, who runs a construction
company that employs mainly undocumented immigrants, and the knowledge
that their working conditions are dangerous and illegal. The sense of
responsibility that weighs so heavily on him, and that forces him to
choose between two forms of betrayal, arises from a larger injustice.
In “The Son” (2003), perhaps the most intimate of the Dardennes’ movies,
a carpentry teacher finds himself serving as mentor to the young man
responsible for the death of his son, and confounded by warring impulses
of revenge and forgiveness. But matters of class and labor hover over
that tale as well. The grieving father (played by Olivier Gourmet, a
polestar of the Dardenne universe) is grounded in the dignity of work
and the discipline of craft. The nihilism he sees in the sullen teenage
killer is a symptom of the loss of such values, a loss that haunts
nearly every frame the Dardennes have shot.
It afflicts the reckless protagonist of “L’Enfant” (2005), a shallow
young charmer who blithely drifts from petty crime to outright
monstrosity, selling his newborn baby and buying matching leather
jackets for himself and his girlfriend with some of the proceeds. If he
can’t find honest work, he can at least experience some of the pleasures
of consumerism, and giving up his firstborn seems at first like a
reasonable enough exchange.
The title character of “Rosetta” (1999), the first Dardenne brothers
film to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes (“L’Enfant” was the second) is a
17-year-old girl at war with everything in the universe, including
herself, her alcoholic mother, a factory manager and the short-order
cook who may be her only friend. Rosetta’s antisocial and
self-destructive behavior expresses a desire that is at once primal and
practical, banal and profound. What she wants, above all, is to work,
and to secure the kind of social identity and human connection that a
job can provide.
In “Two Days, One Night,” the need for work is also what motivates
Sandra, who is in many ways Rosetta’s opposite: a soft-spoken woman
living with her husband and two children in a tidy, modern townhouse.
But Sandra’s anguish, manifested as depression rather than rage, is
every bit as raw as Rosetta’s, and the stakes of her struggle are if
anything even higher. Laid off after returning from a medical leave, she
must persuade her co-workers to give up their bonuses to cover her
salary. The film’s title and its against-the-clock structure come from
conditions dictated by her boss. On Monday morning, the 16 members of
Sandra’s team will vote on her fate, and she has the weekend to persuade
them to sacrifice their interests — 1,000 euros they have each sweated
to earn and desperately need — for her well-being.
“She is a person we had thought about for 10 years,” Jean-Pierre said.
The idea of a worker forced to bargain for her job not with management
but with her fellow employees was a potent metaphor for the state of
modern capitalism to begin with, but in the wake of the financial crisis
of 2008 and its harsh, prolonged aftermath it took on particular relevance.
“In 2010, 2012 we really began to see the social and economic
consequences,” Luc said, “and that was what brought us back to this
scenario, and convinced us to make the film. There were a lot more
people out of work in our area, and not only in our area.” Anecdotes
that mirrored Sandra’s predicament became more common: Luc noted that in
the months since the French premiere of “Two Days” in the spring, three
companies in Belgium and France had subjected their employees to similar
choices.
“It’s true that we pay attention to what the stories might say about
social relations in Western countries,” Jean-Pierre said, referring to
their work in general. “But it’s always our intention to make films
about the characters in their situations, and not to use them as
mouthpieces for a particular position. If there is a political point of
view in the films, it has to arise from the action, from the circumstances.”
Sandra’s experiences are a perfect illustration of this method. The
viewer accompanies her as she knocks on doors and makes anxious phone
calls in her effort to speak with every one of her colleagues. For her
and for us, the repetitiveness of these encounters is grueling and
uncomfortable, but it is also crucial to the film’s emotional power.
Each meeting is unique, because each person Sandra talks to has
particular responses and concerns. One man, in the midst of a pickup
soccer game, bursts into tears. Another threatens Sandra with violence.
Some have trouble meeting her eyes; others are forthright in their
support or refusal. A few decline to commit one way or another. But as
Jean-Pierre put it: “Each one is as important as Sandra. There are no
secondary roles.”
There is also no judgment, either from Sandra or the filmmakers. What
makes her ordeal especially painful is her strong feeling that she has
no right to ask her colleagues to give up their hard-won money on her
behalf. Why should her needs trump theirs? But of course, this is a
profoundly political question. “The subject of the film is solidarity,”
Luc said.
In the history of labor, in Europe and other Western countries, that
word has associations that stretch from the organizers and agitators of
the Industrial Workers of the World in the American West during World
War I to the Gdansk shipyard workers in the waning years of the Cold
War. That ideal, in the view of the Dardennes, has been eroded by an
ethic of competition and selfishness.
“We wanted to show something of the state we’re in now,” Luc said.
“People are intensely individualistic. They all have money problems.
They are all in debt: paying for the house, the car, the kids. Everyone
is in a state of insecurity, of fear. We wanted to show that, how people
are in a precarious state. In the movie, they are almost all working
more than one job, not to get rich, but to have enough money to pay for
what they need.”
Unlike some Dardennes heroes and heroines, Sandra and her family — and
most of the families she visits — live in at least modest comfort. In
this country, they would be called middle class: They have some nice
things, enough food, a television, a car. Sandra parks in private
driveways and makes her pitch in tidy backyards. But the pathos of the
film comes from the perceived fragility of this standard of living, the
terror that unemployment will mean not only lost income, but also the
more cataclysmic loss of newly won social status, of normalcy.
That is an anxiety that might hit home especially hard in America, where
individualism is more deeply rooted and where the fall from the middle
class is less cushioned by social benefits and workplace protections.
The setting of “Two Days, One Night” may be specifically Belgian, but it
is easy to imagine similar stories being told here about fast-food and
retail workers, baristas and sales associates, house painters and middle
managers who feel the ground shifting under them and their hold on the
American dream slipping.
They are part of a larger narrative: a complex tale of globalization and
the expansion of the consumer economy, of the decline of the old left
and the rise of neoliberalism. It’s a story the Dardennes have been
telling, chapter by chapter, for a long time. In an early journal entry
published in his book, “Au Dos de Nos Images,”(“On the Backs of Our
Images”) Luc Dardenne set out its moral: “The worker has become a
solitary person, the member of a species on the road to extinction,” he
wrote, “Will this disappearance leave behind a legacy? What will it be?”
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