Two days, one night

The Dardenne brothers make films about hard times and tough choices, balancing so much human misery against soul-stirring acts of kindness. Their latest, Two Days, One Night, may be their most accomplished work to date; a socialist epic in miniature, heartfelt and humane. It's a film that finds the brothers shuffling away from the margins and embracing the mainstream. But they do so on their own terms, with their integrity intact.

Marion Cotillard gives a rousing performance as Sandra, the depressed mother who faces the axe from her minimum-wage job at the solar panel plant. The management is bent on edging her out. Her cash-strapped colleagues have sold her clean down the river. Sandra's only hope is to persuade a majority of her co-workers to forgo their €1,000 bonuses ahead of an official vote on Monday morning. "Fight for your job," her husband urges, and yet Sandra is hardly fit enough to haul herself out of bed, let alone wade into battle. The clock keeps on ticking and the weekend is running out.

All credit to the Dardennes for finding an intimate tragedy that shouts so loud to the world beyond. The brothers take one woman's tottering odyssey and give it the heft of a mythic struggle, like a low-rent labours of Hercules in which the original tasks are replaced by the locked door, the secret ballot and the bottle of Xanax on the bathroom shelf. Their heroine picks her way through the pebbledashed suburbs of her Belgian home town, pleading her case to people she has worked alongside and yet barely seems to know. Some refuse to let her in while others respond with a spluttering show of defiance. "I didn't vote against you," one explains. "I voted for my bonus."

Sandra, we come to realise, is not the only victim of this tale. Her fellow employees are similarly overstretched, working illicit weekend jobs. They need that €1,000 to keep their heads above water. And yet the harder Sandra toils, the more she grows in strength. She takes heart from her husband's support, from a glimmer of hope at a football pitch, and from the sound of Them's blues anthem Gloria, bursting like sunshine from the tinny speakers of the family car. Her weekend jaunt does not entirely go as planned. She sees the best of humanity in addition to the worst.

If the film is full of victims, who exactly is the villain? Occasionally, one identifies a possible culprit. There are the brawling colleagues by the lock-up garage; the weaselly foreman who engineered the initial show of hands. Yet these, I think, are mere distractions, a set of stock and brutish archetypes. More likely the film's real evil-doer is the one we never see. Implicitly (and sometimes not so implicitly), Two Days, One Night slams and damns modern management techniques, lifting the lid on a culture of short-term contracts and non-unionised labour. What's the answer? Bond together. In throwing a lifeline to the anguished Sandra, the workers are surely rescuing themselves as well.

The abiding irony of the Dardennes' situation is that their crusading, working-class stories are predominantly consumed by a bourgeois elite. They won their first Palme d'Or for 1999's Rosetta(which climaxed with a bedraggled teenager hauling a gas canister across a trailer park) and their second for 2005's L'Enfant (welfare cheques; black market adoption). Critics dismiss them as the "brothers grim", purveyors of social-realist roughage for the festival circuit, and claim their work is more to be admired than actively enjoyed. But this may now be about to change. Two Days, One Night serves as a bang of the drum, a call to arms, complete with a plot that plays as a palm-sweating thriller, and an Oscar-winning actor bestriding centre stage. Who needs the obligatory Hollywood remake? The boxes have been ticked and the guns have been spiked. All at once, the brothers appear on the brink of a crossover success.

Might the casting of Cotillard count as a compromise? I'm not sure that it does; or rather I'm not convinced that it matters. True, the Dardennes could have chosen to deliver their harsh truths in a less obviously fetching vessel. And yet Cotillard is never less than superb in the role. She's brittle and knackered, grubby and convincing. One has the sense, crucially, of a woman whose beauty has been so ground down by drudgery and depression that it has become at best an irrelevance and at worst a fading memory.

"I don't exist," Sandra laments to her husband, as she puts her hair in a scrunchy and embarks on her quest. She thinks her co-workers cannot see her but it soon turns out they can. With each house that she visits, she rediscovers her fire, reconnects to the world. Who cares, in the end, that the odds are stacked against her and that she may well not get the votes? Two Days, One Night tells us that the fight is always worth it, whatever the result. Even if Sandra loses, she has already won.