Belgian brothers go for Cannes hat-trick with Cotillard

Belgian filmmakers the Dardenne brothers aimed for a record third top prize at Cannes Tuesday with a drama about moral compromise during tough economic times starring Oscar winner Marion Cotillard.

“Two Days, One Night”, one of 18 features vying for the Palme d’Or award at the world’s top film festival, tells the story of an employee of a small solar panel factory that is under intense pressure from Asian competitors.

Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne cast Cotillard as Sandra, a woman who has been on sick leave after a nervous breakdown who has just one weekend to convince her colleagues to vote to sacrifice their annual bonuses so she can keep her job.

Sandra and her husband are trying to raise two children and pay off a mortgage in a suburb of Liege while she is battling a pill addiction.

Her fight to save her position at the factory threatens to send her into another downward spiral as she is forced to go door-to-door begging her fellow workers to vote at a Monday morning staff meeting in her favour.

She encounters a wide range of reactions, including stirring expressions of solidarity and rage at Sandra’s pique in asking other struggling families to do without the bonus for her sake.

The story generates a fair amount of suspense for a film made by the Dardenne brothers, masters of keenly observed portraits of people trying to keep their heads above water.

And the outcome of the staff vote triggers a plot twist where Sandra is faced with her own pivotal choice.

The film drew enthusiastic applause at a press preview at Cannes and talk of a prize for Cotillard, who won an Academy Award in 2008 for her portrayal of singer Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose”.

It is the Dardenne brothers’ first film with a major movie star.

Luc Dardenne brought home the Palme d’Or with his older sibling Jean-Pierre in 1999 for “Rosetta” and in 2005 for “The Child”. He told AFP their latest film was inspired by similar situations during rounds of layoffs in Belgium and the United States in the 1990s.

He slammed “contemporary cynicism” in corporate management, where bosses invoke hard times to justify a kind of blackmail of workers, extracting major concessions in return for protecting jobs.

Luc Dardenne, who said he could not imagine making a film without his brother, called it “cinematic love at first sight” with Cotillard.

But he refused to be drawn on what an unprecedented third Palme d’Or would mean for the siblings as filmmakers.

“We hope the screenings go well, to help the film find its audience,” he said.

– Women at crossroads –

Cotillard, who also models for French fashion house Dior, wears a sloppy fluorescent tank top and looks utterly exhausted during much of the film.

She told reporters that she had been eager to play against type in order to work with the Dardennes.

“I know that I can manage, if the part requires it, to be quite beautiful or quite ugly,” she said.

“I can transform myself, that’s what I’m trying to say, and that’s quite an asset in the job I do.”

She said she sought complex parts of women at crossroads in their lives.

“I think these women are people who are truly fighting for survival and they discover reserves within themselves that they didn’t know they had,” she said of the meaty roles her Oscar had allowed her take.

“I’m deeply touched by survivors.”

Reviewer Scott Foundas of trade magazine Variety praised the Dardennes’ “typically superb social drama” that was “infused with the suspense of a ticking-clock thriller”.

Robbie Collin of London’s Daily Telegraph gave it four out of five stars, hailing the Dardennes for creating “enough moral shading to their story to prevent it becoming a tract, and tie it up with an ethical conundrum so dripping with juice, the usherettes should have been handing out bibs”.

A jury led by New Zealand director Jane Campion will hand out the top prizes at the 67th Cannes Film Festival at a gala ceremony on Saturday.