Old Yorker

  • Two Days, One Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Deux jours, une nuit

    Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (2014)

    The Dardenne brothers seem to be mellowing in their late middle age, at least as far as casting is concerned.  They very successfully used a well-known actress, Cécile de France, in a leading role in The Kid with a Bike.  The Dardennes’ latest is virtually a one-woman show for a star, Marion Cotillard.  In Two Days, One Night – set in the Dardennes’ usual territory of the small industrial town of Seraing, near the brothers’ native city of Liège – Cotillard plays Sandra, a young wife and mother about to return to work, after suffering some kind of nervous breakdown, at a small solar-panel factory (Solwal).  During Sandra’s absence, the factory owner and his foreman have realised they can manage without her, provided that the other sixteen staff work slightly longer hours.  Management proposes a thousand euro bonus for each worker if they agree that Sandra should be made redundant.  Most of them badly need the money and accept the offer.  Sandra learns the news on a Friday afternoon.  She and Juliette (Catherine Salée), one of the few colleagues who opposed the offer, catch the boss Dumont (Baptiste Sornin) just as he’s leaving the factory.  They persuade him to take another vote on Monday morning.  Two Days, One Night describes Sandra’s attempts over the intervening weekend to get her co-workers to change their minds.

    It’s no surprise that this film isn’t 12 Angry Men and not simply because Sandra needs, rather than complete consensus, only a majority of her colleagues to support her.  It’s a relief anyway that not all the factory workers do the altruistically right thing (as they likely would in, say, a Ken Loach film).  Of course it’s necessary for dramatic suspense for the new vote to be knife-edge but the Dardennes’ socialism is nuanced enough to supply most of those who don’t shift their position with a good economic reason for doing so.  The Dardennes are evidently aware that the upbeat ending of The Kid with a Bike will raise the hopes of some of their audience (including me) of a repeat here.  For a few moments, it appears this will be forthcoming:  Sandra falls one vote short when the ballot results in a tie but Dumont then tells her he’s willing to give her back her job.  The sting in the tail is that he won’t therefore continue to employ the only one of the sixteen staff on a fixed-term contract – a young man called Alphonse (Serge Koto), the last of her colleagues whom Sandra got to see, late on Sunday evening.  Alphonse initially agrees to vote for Sandra rather than the bonus but, by the time their conversation ends, is havering, fearful of having his contract terminated in just the way the boss now intends.  (Alphonse nevertheless votes for Sandra.)   It’s clever (if unsurprising) that Sandra has to face the moral dilemma with which she confronted her colleagues.  It’s not unconvincing that she doesn’t need to think long before declining Dumont’s offer.  Yet the very ending of Two Days, One Night suggests that the Dardennes are softening in the resolution of their stories – and less persuasively here than in The Kid with a Bike.  It seems from her phone call to her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) and her smiling final walk away from camera that we’re meant think the experience has been the making of Sandra and given renewed strength to a marriage that was in trouble.  I found both things hard to accept; that caused me to leave the cinema feeling somewhat dissatisfied – and reminded me of other weaknesses of Two Days, One Night.  I’d been able, thanks to what’s undoubtedly a compelling story, to put these to the back of my mind as I watched the film.

    Sandra is so mentally and emotionally fragile from the start that there’s an element of suspension of disbelief in accepting her willingness even to start approaching her Solwal colleagues and to ask them to put her before their own finances.  The Dardennes are well aware of this – Sandra is more than once on the point of giving up – but what made her continuing campaign credible to me was the role that her strongly supportive husband plays over the weekend.  At one point, however, Sandra tells Manu she thinks he doesn’t love her any more – that he feels sorry for her but doesn’t love her.  Manu can hardly bring himself to refute this and it rings true.  As played by Fabrizio Rongione (who is Belgian, in spite of his name), Manu appears determined rather than naturally driven to do the right thing.  There’s something slightly effortful in his displays of physical affection towards Sandra.  Of course there’s an urgent financial need for her to keep her job – the couple have two young children – but you still get a sense from Rongione that the family crisis is energising Manu into newly decisive behaviour that transforms the couple’s life together.

    After what seems like a clinching setback during the Sunday afternoon, Sandra attempts suicide.  Marion Cotillard’s playing of this, as Sandra matter of factly swallows Xanax tablets and returns the foils, now emptied, to the bathroom cabinet, is impressive – but there’s not enough residue from the episode to prevent it feeling like a melodramatic shot in the arm to the plot (and Sandra’s discharge from hospital is remarkably rapid).  There’s no suggestion that Sandra and Manu are deliberately subduing thoughts of what has just happened until all the co-workers have been seen (and the couple’s children have disappeared from the action at this stage).   All the overdose really achieves is to make you feel the factory foreman Jean-Marc (Olivier Gourmet), who’s meant to be a nasty piece of work, has a point in asserting that Sandra’s psychological frailty means that Solwal would be better off without her.   It’s puzzling too that Sandra isn’t more affected by the break-up of the marriage of one of her colleagues as a result of the events of the weekend.  Because Anne (Christelle Cornil) is well out of a life with her bastard of a husband Yvon (Philippe Jeusette), the Dardennes seem to overlook how Sandra would be likely to react to being, in effect, the cause of the break-up.

    Two Days, One Night is far from great but it’s completely absorbing and, at ninety-five minutes, refreshingly concise.  The Dardennes are particularly good at locating the exchanges between Sandra and her co-workers – the laundrette where she sees Alphonse, a makeshift football pitch where another young man Timur is training local kids.  (Her encounter with an older colleague, Hicham (Hicham Slaoui), is relatively clumsy.  His wife has been very cagey about where her husband is and Sandra bumps into him in  the mini-mart where he’s moonlighting.)  It’s really affecting when Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev) breaks down in tears, telling Sandra how ashamed he was not to support her in the original vote and thanking her for the second chance – and Marion Cotillard’s initial disbelief at his reaction is very right.  It’s not so right when she walks away from the encounter with a radiantly hopeful smile on her face but her acting is mostly admirable and she carries the film effortlessly.  It’s both ironic and rather heartening that the beautiful Cotillard,  whose international breakthrough was achieved through an elaborate (and overrated) impersonation of Edith Piaf in La vie en rose, is now being cast – rather in the way that her compatriot Juliette Binoche also sometimes is – for her charismatic naturalness.

    28 August 2014

  • Tucker: The Man and His Dream

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francis Ford Coppola (1988)

    It’s not a surprise to find that it’s weightless and enervated but Tucker – The Man and His Dream is still a distressing experience.  Coppola is such a naturally expressive director that he manages to put himself, and reflect his state of mind, in his films – even when that state of mind means that he can’t give the material any emotional or dramatic force.   Preston Tucker was a car designer and entrepreneur.  In the late 1940s, he tried to produce and market the variously innovative ‘1948 Tucker Sedan’, challenging the supremacy of the ‘Big Three’ of the American automobile industry (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler).  Establishment forces conspired against Tucker:  he was accused of stock fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and stood trial.  He was acquitted but the financial consequences of the legal proceedings were ruinous for his company, which folded.   He continued to work on designing new types of car but died, aged only fifty-three, in 1956.  His influence on car design, however, has been considerable and enduring.   It isn’t difficult to see parallels, from Coppola’s point of view, between Tucker’s treatment by vested interests within the car industry and his own in the American film industry of the 1980s, and the financial problems of Zoetrope.  Coppola’s other bête noire of the time was the press.  The newspapers of forty years earlier were out to destroy Tucker too.

    Most of the time, Tucker seems to be happening inside Coppola’s head rather than on the screen.  In The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, different periods are recreated and brought to life vividly and, it seems, effortlessly.  The same production and set designer, Dean Tavoularis, worked on Tucker yet all the scrupulous period detail here seems merely displayed, not integrated – because there’s next to nothing for it to be integrated with.  It’s understandable that the cars are the stars of the show but they have shockingly little human competition.  (There might have been some animal competition if the Tucker family dalmatians had stayed around longer but they disappear without explanation – as if they were nothing more than a design idea Coppola tired of.)  Nearly all the characters are one-dimensional – they’re goodies or baddies and they demonstrate that repeatedly and unvaryingly, never developing into anything richer.  Tucker has a good cast but the monotonous, sketchy performances are painful to watch in comparison to what you’re used to from Coppola’s earlier work – not just the first two Godfather pictures, which feature arguably the finest ensemble acting ever filmed, but The Conversation and Apocalypse Now too.

    Coppola’s conception of Tucker as a wronged creative genius is so blinkered that it doesn’t allow Jeff Bridges in the lead any opportunities to get at something more complex.  Martin Landau’s portrait of Tucker’s loyal, worrywart financier is meticulously thought out and delivered yet you feel that the 1970s Coppola would have helped the actor to conceal his ingenuity more.  As members of Tucker’s engineering team, Frederic Forrest is OK and Elias Koteas more than OK.  But Joan Allen is blah as Tucker’s ever-loving wife and Christian Slater dull as his son.  The guest (uncredited) appearances – by Lloyd Bridges (as a corrupt politician) and Dean Stockwell (as Howard Hughes) – aren’t as incisive as you’d hope.

    The start of the film suggests that Tucker’s story is going to be told as a promotional film made by his own company but this isn’t sustained.  (The screenplay is by Arnold Schulman and David Seidler, who this year has entered the limelight thanks to his overrated script for The King’s Speech.)   All the way through, scenes dribble on and fizzle out.  There are only two significant exceptions – because I kept hoping that Coppola would snap out of it, I was grateful for these sequences, even though it didn’t require a director of his quality to make them succeed.  The first is the public unveiling of the 1948 Tucker Sedan, which its inventor stages like the performer that he is and where a good deal of frenetic behind-the-curtains activity is needed to get the show, as it were, on the road.  The second is Tucker’s trial:  in a way, it’s dispiriting in itself that something as conventionally climactic as a courtroom scene brings the film to life but there’s one moment here that recalls vintage Coppola.   After the industrial-political interests in the witness box have tried to sink Tucker, he asks to make the closing address himself.   The trial judge (Joseph Miksak) is outrageously biased against him and, with the prosecuting attorney, keeps trying to shut Tucker up.   In the mayhem of angry words, the foreman of the jury, an elderly, unconfident looking man, suddenly shouts in exasperation:  ‘Let the man speak!’  There’s real force and surprise in this moment – and the intervention is tethered to the character which Al Nalbandian, the actor playing the foreman, has established with marvellous speed and economy.  It’s a genuine reminder that, in the 1970s, there was no role too small for Coppola to give attention and full life to.

    The outcome of Tucker’s subsequent plea to the court – railing against the crushing effects of corporate power on the individual entrepreneurial spirit, appealing to the jury’s decent ordinary American impulses – may be predictable but I was relieved, because Tucker is otherwise such unhappy viewing, by the relatively upbeat ending.   According to Wikipedia, a biography of Tucker (who, like Coppola, was originally from Michigan) was planned as early as 1973, when the director had the world at his feet.  It might have been an interesting film then.  By the time it got made, too much water had flowed under the bridge and iron entered Coppola’s soul.

    3 July 2011

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