Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 218: Thu Aug 7

Two Days, One Night (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2014): Somerset House, 9pm


Each summer, The Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court hosts London's most beautiful open-air cinema, the Film4 Summer Screen. The series features a range of films, all showing on a state-of-the-art screen with full surround sound. The UK premiere of the new Dardennes brothers' latest movie will be a highlight this year. Full details of the season at Somerset House can be found here.

Time Out review:
Two Days, One Night features a career-high performance from Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard – by far the Dardennes' starriest casting to date – and has a starting-gun premise: a young mother, Sandra (Cotillard), recently off work with depression, is made redundant from a small factory that makes solar panels. In her absence, 14 of her 16 colleagues have voted to take their bonuses (around 1,000 euros each) rather than let her keep her job. But willed into action by a supportive husband, Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), she persuades her boss to give her one last chance and to host a second vote round of voting two days later. Will she be able to save her job by knocking on doors over the weekend to persuade her colleagues to support her? This is political drama (with the smallest of p's) at its finest and most humane: heady, engaging, gently ingraining ideas about empowerment, taking a stand and how we organise our societies into the fabric of the film. Each one of Sandra's encounters is a surprise and adds shade or a new perspective to what we think the film has to tell us about human nature and how we live our lives. There are no heroes or villains here; everybody is simply getting by, and by the skin of their teeth. After spending 'Two Days, One Night' in the company of Sandra, you'll be punching the air with pride.
Dave Calhoun

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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