sleeping beauty
by Douglas Messerli
Luc
Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (writers and directors) Deux jours, une nuit (Two
Days, One Night) / 2014
The unanswered phone call, from a close
friend, is an attempt to report that Sandra’s fellow workers have just been
asked to vote whether to allow her to return to work or to each receive a 1000
Euro bonus. Predictably, the vote has been overwhelmingly against Sandra; who
wouldn’t choose a bonus, given the fact that many of her fellow-employees are
in similar straits or even worse off? Yet, it is just that question—“who wouldn’t
vote against Sandra?”— that the directors’, driven by their usual moral
inquisitiveness, ask.
Evidently, the telephone caller, Juliette
(Catherine Salée), did not make that choice, and her call is a plea for Sandra to
immediately join her at the plant (on a late Friday afternoon) in order to
argue before their employer, M. Dumont, that a second, fairer ballet, be
scheduled for Monday morning. The shop foreman, Jean-Marc, has evidently
convinced some of the workers that if they did not vote against Sandra that
their own jobs would be in jeopardy; they catch Dumont at the last moment as he
is about to leave for the weekend, and he agrees to allow a second vote.
So,
it is established, Sandra has a weekend, two days and one night, to meet with
her co-workers and convince them to vote against their bonus allowing her to
stay on the job. The absurd situation in which Sandra finds herself—truly a
tortuously unfair position in which to put any human being—is clearly symbolic
of the Belgian system’s (and, perhaps, any industrial system’s) inability to
care for employees as individuals. The very depression brought on by the
conditions in her life, has evidently sealed her fate: she is no longer
necessary; the others have worked hard to keep up production in her absence
and, clearly, deserve their promised bonuses.
Faced with such insurmountable circumstances,
who might blame Sandra for becoming ill by just thinking of the position in
which her employer has put her? There is no way to perceive her task as
anything but an attempt to beg for her survival from people who, like her, need
and deserve the extra benefits of their hard work.
Although she recognizes that she must, simply
for the survival of her family, take on the task of meeting one by one with her
fellow workers, in her still “unawakened” state she would far prefer to swallow
her Xanax and retreat to bed. The Dardennes offer their heroine only one
important advantage: her husband, Manu, is a loving, caring, and intelligent
being who not only supports her but gently and insistently urges her on,
helping her, along with her children, to catalogue the addresses she needs,
arranging for the children to be cared for by their grandmother, and willingly taking
time off to drive her to some of the meetings. Sandra is also given strong
support by two friends, Juliette and another co-worker, a more shadowy, if
important, figure.
In one of the most remarkable encounters,
a worker, Timur, upon encountering her in person, breaks into tears expressing
his shame for having voted against her and revealing that he has a deeper sense
of fair play and morality than even Sandra can herself imagine. Sandra’s
encounter with one female employee ends in the woman leaving her husband, who
demands she vote against her fellow employee; amazingly Sandra and Manu take in
the now homeless woman for the night, and a real comradery develops between
them that might never been established in the workplace.
In many of the encounters, the workers are
not at home when Sandra visits them. She tracks them down in bars, working at “in
the black” (off record) jobs, volunteering their time—situations that reveal to
her and us the complexities of everyday living in contemporary French-speaking
Belgium. And it is these “outings” which also help to present Sandra with a
wider view of the society in which clearly she has felt as a kind of outsider.
Indeed, we gradually begin to perceive, as she comes to recognize, nearly all
her fellow-workers are undergoing some degree of deprivation and suffering. The
society these encounters reveal is filled with hardy workers near the end of
their tether. At several points, Sandra herself breaks down, unable to pursue
what she comes to comprehend an unfair request, to put her welfare over their
own. Yet some make that very choice; a substantial number of individuals are
convinced to vote for her over their pocket books.
But just as she seems about to succeed in
this awful task, she once again falters. After quietly making up her children’s
beds as might a loving mother on any ordinary day, she returns to the bathroom,
to where she has retreated several times to down another pill; but this time
she insistently removes not just one pill from the packet but all of them,
releasing them from their packets before downing them en masse, seemingly determined to end her life. Her husband’s
return with good news—another worker has called to say she will vote for
Sandra—forces her to admit to her selfish act and she is rushed to the
hospital.
Even after this rash interruption,
however, Sandra is forced to visit others, later in the evening, encountering a
Black fellow worker who is willing to vote for her but fears that, as a part-time
employee, it will mean the loss of his own job.
The Dardennes’ solve the problem by
having the vote be evenly split. Accordingly, Sandra loses her job, yet the
morality of the world in which she lives—at least half of it—is restored. Given
a chance, people can make moral decisions as opposed to simply selfish ones.
For her actions, indeed, Sandra is awarded by her employer an opportunity,
after a short layoff, to return to her job. But the “award” means that the
part-time employees will be fired; if there is anything that Sandra has learned
in her voyage is that to accept those terms would be as immoral as the terms
Dumont has set up for her own firing. She refuses, thus freeing herself, at
least temporarily, from such a corrupt world.
At film’s end, even in her loss she has
won back her self-respect, recognizing that she has been “cured” from the
depressing and cynical vision that her world has previously imposed upon her.
Calling Manu, she relays the facts, insisting she will begin looking for a new
job the very next day. The renewed vigor in her voice says everything: Sandra
is a transformed being, a sleeping beauty now awakened to the beauty and the
nobility of the human race.
Los Angeles,
January 21, 2015
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