Since 1978, Jean-Pierre Dardenne and his younger brother Luc have been making documentaries and feature films about rough, blue-collar neighborhoods in and around the city of Liege in the French-speaking Wallonia area of their native Belgium.
Despite the fact that their films like The Kid With a Bike and The Son are in French and feature areas of their homeland that aren't as familiar or even as seemingly cinematic as Brussels, Antwerp or Bruges, they export as easily as some of the nation's better ales.
Their latest entry Two Days, One Night stars Oscar winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, Midnight in Paris, Inception) as a struggling mother named Sandra trying to return to work after a bout of depression. Her task is complicated by the fact that her boss at the solar panel factory has given her co-workers a choice between keeping her on or giving up some of the bonuses they need to pay the bills. In an act of desperation, Sandra talks to each of the employees and begs them to vote to keep her employed.
The storyline might not sound terribly cheery, but it has struck a chord. Cotillard has received another Oscar nod for the film, which opens today in Arkansas. The movie has also won dozens of awards in the United States and around the world.
When asked if he thought the film might play well outside of his homeland, the older Dardenne sibling paused and started laughing. "We were hoping for that," he says from Brussels. "We didn't want Sandra to be some kind of Belgian exception to what was going on in Europe or globally."
While Dardenne warmly greets me on the phone in careful English and apologizes for Luc's unavailability, the challenging socioeconomic themes in his movie require an interpreter to help me get past my limited grasp of French. "Je suis un reporter de le Arkansas Democrat-Gazette" isn't going to cut it.
That said, Sandra's situation sounds hardly limited to Belgium.
"It's because there's an unemployment crisis and there's a de-industrialization in Belgium as well as in Europe that the boss at the plant in the film is even in a position to suggest the kind of deal that he does. It's because the employees have their backs to the wall. It doesn't look like it's going to get any better."
He adds, "In the European papers and the media, there is noise being made about a re-industrialization that is happening in the States. All the information I get is in the papers so I don't know if it is true or not."
Making a Star Shine
Because the movies the Dardenne brothers have made are modestly budgeted, it was a coup for them to land Cotillard, who frequently works in Hollywood films.
I asked if they had difficulty getting the French actress to nail the Belgian accent or to play a working-class role after playing the legendary singer Edith Piaf.
"No. No," Dardenne says emphatically. "But if you want to know the gamble we were making was that she'd be able to become part of our actor family and that we would be able to make her as banal as possible in order for Sandra to really exist. All the work we did in the rehearsal and during the shoot was going toward that. Now, she's a great actress. As a great actress, she was able to disappear into the character. Not a lot of actresses can do that."
In addition to the "actor family" he mentioned, the Dardennes have worked with Belgian star Cecile De France (Clint Eastwood's Hereafter) and with some surprisingly talented nonprofessionals. For example, Thomas Doret, the actor who played Cyril, the title character in The Kid With a Bike, had never acted before.
When asked if there was a difference between working with established performers such as De France and Cotillard and nonprofessionals, Dardenne cautiously answers, "It's true we often have a mix, but Fabrizio Rongione, the actor who played Manu [Sandra's husband] , worked with us on several films and he's also worked with other filmmakers. All the other actors are Belgian theater actors, and the very young ones were in theater school. In this particular film, we were dealing with an entire team of theater professionals."
"The difference between working with pro and nonpros, the aim is the same. What we want to do is make them naked so they can take on the properties of the characters. Now with nonpros, what does it mean to strip them naked? They have an image of themselves. They're used to seeing themselves a certain way and behaving a certain way, so we have to kind of take away that consciousness and image to be able to work with them.
"With pros, they tend to have attitudes about acting and they have a technique. Sometimes that technique is actually an obstacle to the stripping down of the actor because they have found a way to avoid their problems by using the technique. Again, we try to make them as naked as possible, and that happens during the prep and rehearsal."
No Place Like Home
The Dardenne brothers racked up a lot of accolades despite the fact that their home country doesn't have the infrastructure for filmmaking that France or Germany have. Nonetheless, Belgium submitted Two Days, One Night as the nation's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Academy Awards.
"It's complicated .... It is true that there is no real film industry in Belgium," Dardenne explains. "That can be a handicap in terms of building a project and having the support to bring confidence to the project by having a support structure. But I would say the big advantage would be the freedom and the independence that allows us to work because there's no pressure from the industry."
He adds, "There is some pressure because without an industry, a film cannot exist. But this kind of structure puts us in more of an artisanal position. Maybe, but this is just a hypothesis."
MovieStyle on 02/06/2015