Working with his brother Luc, Jean-Pierre Dardenne makes the struggle to earn a living painfully absorbing. We value their patience with people under pressure, though the encounters can sometimes look too carefully arranged.
Fi1m perspective
In Two Days, One Night (2014), Sandra keeps having to ask her fellow factory workers to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne build suspense by repeating that request, with Marion Cotillard making the effort of asking matter each time. We found it painful to watch because the film lets us understand why a colleague might refuse her. Their willingness to stay with those reasons is what makes the brothers worth following.
The attention to working lives goes back to the documentaries they began making in Wallonia in the 1970s. Fiction followed with Falsch (1987), but La Promesse (1996) brought their international breakthrough and established the working-class settings and difficult choices that recur through their films. Rosetta (1999) concentrated on a young woman's struggle for work and dignity. The young migrants of Tori and Lokita (2022) continue that concern with how people survive and whom they can depend on.
Their handheld camera often follows from behind or over a shoulder, staying close to people as they move rather than stopping to explain them. Cinematographer Alain Marcoen is a recurring collaborator in this plain, close-following cinema, with its available light and little or no music. The restraint works when it gives an actor time to show a difficult decision being made. Cotillard makes the repeated conversations in Two Days, One Night absorbing without our needing a fresh plot development each time.
The method has a weakness we can see clearly in Two Days, One Night. A few encounters fit their allotted response too neatly, and we begin to notice how thoroughly the writers have covered the possibilities. It is a small but noticeable flaw in a film whose hold depends on taking each colleague seriously. We prefer the moments when a refusal has enough weight to make Sandra's request uncomfortable, rather than merely providing the next hurdle. Start with Cotillard's weekend campaign, and give the people who say no a fair hearing.
Biography
Jean-Pierre Dardenne is a Belgian film director, writer and producer. He was born on 21 April 1951 in Engis, Wallonia. He works closely with his brother Luc Dardenne; the pair write, direct and produce their films together.
The brothers began with documentaries in the late 1970s before moving to fiction features. They gained international attention with La Promesse (1996). Their film Rosetta (1999) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, as did The Child (2005). Other notable works include The Son (2002), Lorna's Silence (2008), The Kid with a Bike (2011), Two Days, One Night (2014) and Young Ahmed (2019).
