Two Days, One Night

This may be the most accessible film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and also the most contrived, but they still manage to make it an extremely taut, emotionally suspenseful experience. It helps that they have the astounding Marion Cotillard starring as Sandra, a woman who is about to be laid off from her factory job. Her fate hinges on her coworkers vote to keep her on, so she must convince each one of them to vote for her. The twist (and here is where the Dardennes get you to suspend your disbelief) is that either she stays, or they get a bonus. They also give Sandra an enormous hurdle, which is the reason for the precariousness of her situation: she is trying to recover from depression. Her struggle, then, is doubly heroic, as she must overcome both herself and her predicament.
You will be momentarily distracted by thinking that this situation would never fly in the Lawsuit States Of America, and probably even less in Europe, where employment laws make it virtually impossible to fire workers in certain countries, but the Dardennes are such skillful and elegant writers, that it doesn't matter much. What matters is the core of the argument: are you willing to ask people to sacrifice something for you? Is what you are asking fair? Sandra's coworkers need the bonus money as much as she needs to keep her job. She and her husband have kids and a mortgage, they are inching towards the middle class.
The Dardennes show us how difficult it is for most people to claw their way into financial stability. And these are not the poor. These are productive people who are not in the margins of society. The Dardennes are chroniclers of the struggling working class, and all their movies are moral fables about hard ethical choices their characters face in an indifferent, callous system. They make high concept films with incredibly tight premises and turn them into harrowing emotional and moral thrillers. They do this without violence, and without dramatic extravagance in modest but very powerful films. My favorite, L'Enfant, is the story of a dissolute young father who decides to sell his baby, because, why not? Everything else seems to be for sale. It is more horrifying than many scary movies.
Two Days, One Night is, like most of their films, a quietly subversive movie. It may be about a woman struggling to keep her job, and it may include a strong critique of capitalism (as most of their movies do), but it keeps you glued to your seat wanting to find out what will happen to Sandra. It even has a ticking bomb plot; there is a deadline to her efforts and if she fails, her world will collapse. Just like Tom Cruise trying to defuse a bomb in Mission Impossible III, but with an outcome of real consequence. The planet may not be in peril, but we want to know if Sandra will be able to sway her peers, who will surprise her with kindness, indifference, or cowardice. We are used to movies with such manipulative plots, but they are rarely at the service of profound ideas about work, society, and solidarity.
Making it all hit you in the heart like a ton of bricks is Marion Cotillard, a fierce actress who can cry oceans at will without an ounce of self-pity. American glamorous actresses (think Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie) try for everywoman roles once in a while and no matter how many notches they are taken down in the looks department, you never for a minute forget that they are glamorous beings pretending to rough it. While they may give it their all, they do not successfully conjure the illusion that they are truly someone else.
Here, La Cotillard wears the same pair of jeans and a couple of wifebeaters for the two days of the title, and makes you wonder how this shriveled woman also happens to be the face of Dior. She is haggard and walks with a slouch. Yet at her most vulnerable she does not fish for sympathy. She is just natural and real, and willing to go to the depths of despair for us, which is what all great actors do: go boldly to places in the soul no one really ever wants to visit.

The Immigrant

This is one puzzling movie. In general, I enjoy the films of James Gray, a director who likes to tell intimate family dramas about mostly immigrant New Yorkers (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own The Night, Two Lovers).
His films are of small scope but big emotional gestures, modest but solid. This time, he transports us to early 1920's Ellis Island, where two Polish sisters have just arrived with thousands of aspiring immigrants. One of the sisters is sick and coughing, and gets separated from Ewa (Marion Cotillard). Ewa is denied entry on the grounds of loose morals (which is rather rich coming from the deeply corrupt authorities) and plucked out of the deportation line by a Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), who promises to give her a job as a seamstress. It turns out he is a burlesque emcee and a pimp who trolls Ellis Island to find girls for his revue. And she has no choice but to stick with him.
The story is old fashioned and has the trappings of grand melodrama. In La Cotillard's performance, it has a heroine who is traumatized, innocent, but a shrewd survivor. 
The amber toned cinematography by Darius Khondji seems to suspend everything in a dusty past. The movie is slow and heavy like molasses.Casting Joaquin Phoenix as a Jewish two-bit impresario does not help. There is nothing about him that feels vaguely from New York, (he seems to have just arrived from Hollywood and Vine) but he is, as usual, riveting. He is a good ham, he makes quirky choices, he has some good moments. I could watch him snore and be mesmerized, but he seems rather uneven and adrift in the part. I think of Paul Giamatti or Stanley Tucci, or even Adrian Brody: someone who screams old New York. Jeremy Renner, who plays Bruno's cousin, a Houdini wannabe and rival for Eva's affection, tries to dazzle, but also seems wrong. In general, the main characters are thinly sketched. The only one who is busy filling in the blanks with more layers than anyone has any reason to expect is Marion Cotillard.
She seems as fragile, scared, traumatized and stubborn as she is supposed to be. She is a great silent actress, but she is also capable of acting persuasively both in Polish and English, none of which are her native language. She also happens to be stunning, and Khondji lights her beautifully. Whether she's tired and gaunt and without makeup, or made up like a floozy, you cannot take your eyes off her. She is so good, I can't think of anybody else in the part.
The story sounds good on paper: A crook falls for a defenseless woman he intends to use for profit and she ends up changing him. They are both reluctant to fall under each other's spell. I suspect that a lot of what feels inactive has to do with a script that tells us about bad stuff that happened, yet we don't get to see it. We are told  things we already know, we are told by the other girls that Weiss is in love with her. We only see this clearly towards the end, in a scene where he listens in to her confessing to a priest, and he has a realization that he is destroying her. Then he confesses to her something that we knew from the beginning. There is no momentum. The actions are broad and melodramatic, but they seem imposed on the characters, not earned by force of personality. It was unclear to me if Ewa was that innocent, or if she used her innocence to preserve herself. I was not sure if she was equally repelled and attracted by Weiss, but sparks should have flown while they only sputter. I still enjoyed the really old fashioned story, the mournful music, the way Gray summons the convoluted and hypocritical morals of the day, but I kept wondering why such a big, redemptive drama feels so confined and airless.

Rust And Bone

The great Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips, The Beat My Heart Skipped, A Prophet) has written (with Thomas Bidegain) and directed an intense story of two worlds that collide in the guise of the formidable Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead). It is the love story of Stephanie and Ali, a reluctant couple that meets haphazardly at a club where he works as a bouncer and comes to her aid in a melee. They belong to a different class. She works as a whale trainer in Marineland, a tacky marine park in the south of France, and he's a troglodyte, a bit of a drifter with a 5-year old in tow, who is crashing at his sister's house. These two firmly believe in their own obstacles. She is the victim of a horrid accident, which makes her first depressed and then brittle and scared of love, and he is a royal fuck up, a beast, unsentimental, primal and irresponsible. But somewhere beneath all that muscle, he has a decent heart (and the hots for her) and he becomes her friend. He gets her out of her rut almost without wanting to, by refusing to feed her self pity. And she slowly warms up to him, which is almost as painful as having another accident. They are both physically battered, and love doesn't make it any easier. Rust and Bone is the story of how they end up loving each other despite their best efforts. If this sounds trite, in the masterful hands of Audiard, it certainly isn't. He has the good sense to cast Cotillard, who is a monster actress. Cotillard takes us through the hell of Stephanie's life after her accident without sentimentality, with courage and absolute veracity. It is a totally restrained performance, porous, transparent and transcendent. At some point she reads Ali the riot act, and it's like she is training another whale. But as strong and commanding as she tries to be, he devastates her, because she is vulnerable to him, to his mystifying power. Matthias Schoenaerts is also fantastic as Ali, a giant child with vast reserves of anger he uses best to beat other boxers to a pulp. Schoenaerts is a phenomenon: he has the body of a monster truck, but a sweet, childish face, and he is a gifted actor. Together, the two are combustible, particularly since they are wary of each other. She is a bit haughty and keeps him at bay and he responds by being an alpha male, oblivious to manners, and utterly unwilling to show her pity. They keep crossing the boundaries they both set, afraid of falling in love, until they are too much in each other's lives. 

Rust and Bone is an intense emotional experience, but not a histrionic one. Audiard's sensibility is more visceral and less intellectual than that of many of his French colleagues, and he is best at observing and portraying people's difficulty with their own emotions. Rust and Bone is adapted from a short story by Canadian writer Craig Davidson and features a great soundtrack with lots of pop songs in English, plus the elegant music of Alexandre Desplat, who does particularly good work in Audiard's films, here as reined in and as powerful as is everybody else in this stunning movie.