"Two Days, One Night" - Norma Rae in retreat

Imagine you're in the open ocean drowning and the only thing you can do to get your head above water is to grab ahold of the feet of the companions a few feet above you who are kicking as hard as they can to draw a breath of air. They may be able to rescue you if they work together, but it's possible, even if they try, that they will be pulled under. What can you ask of them? What sacrifice are they obligated to make to help save your life?

This scene captures much of Sandra's (Marion Cotillard) situation at the opening of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's film Two Days, One Night. About to return from disability leave from her job at a small solar panel manufacturing plant in Belgium, Sandra learns that the manager of the factory, M. Dumont, has offered her sixteen co-workers a Faustian bargain of sorts: they can vote to allow Sandra to return to work as before, or they can vote to have her laid off and, as a consequence, each reap a €1,000 bonus.

A vote, taken on the Friday before Sandra is scheduled to return, goes 15-1 against her. But she learns from her one faithful supporter, Julliette, that it has been tainted by the meddling of the plant's foreman. Devastated by the bad news and still beaten down by the depression that has led to her absence from work, it is all Sandra can do to do to get out of bed and to go with Juliette to the plant and plead with Dumont for a makeover vote.

Backing his car out of the parking lot, eager to head home for the weekend, M. Dumont relents and agrees to a second vote on Monday. And thus begins Sandra's two days and one night, the time she has to convince her co-workers to vote to give up their bonus pay so that she can keep her job.

The movie then unfolds as series of tense encounters, as Sandra locates each of them to make her case to stay employed. These typically begin with a knock on the door in a working class neighborhood and a puzzled, but polite, welcome by the co-worker himself or a wife or a child. Each of her pleas becomes an affecting drama in its own right. And Cotillard uses these dramatic moments to display her impressive power as an actor.

But what is most remarkable about Two Days is its unelaborated upon backstory. Globalization and its impact on advanced, once worker-oriented economies of Western Europe is the elephant in the room. Sandra's company, faced with stiff competition from a Chinese solar competitor, is fighting for its financial life and is determined to do so on the backs of its employees.

The unsettling premise of the film is that, when faced with obvious manipulation by management designed to extract concessions from employees and sow dissension in their ranks, workers roll over without complaint. No demands are made for sacrifices from M. Dumont, his higher-ups, or, God forbid, the shareholders of the company. Sandra and her co-workers accept these indignities matter of factly and then proceed to fight among themselves over scraps from the master's table.

In another age, Marion Cotillard, certainly more than beautiful enough, would have played a latter-day Marianne, leading the charge of the economically dispossessed to the barricades to turn back corporate greed, or a Belgian Norma Rae, rallying workers to unite in pursuit of their common economic cause. Instead Sandra's struggle, as compelling as it is as portrayed by Cotillard in Two Days, One Night, is directed solely at her inward demons and not at those roaming unchecked in the outside world.

"Contagion"- An Ode to Public Health and Medical Science

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is one of that rare breed of films that succeeds as both a compelling drama and as a rich and informative movie about science.

At the heart of the drama here are the stories of the three women who are Contagion's scientists heroes: a World Health Organization disease detective played by Marion Cotillard, who works coolly and systematically to piece together the puzzle of the origin of a rapidly spreading viral illness; an Epidemic Intelligence Service boots-on-the-ground, brave first-responder (a studiously understated Kate Winslet) who puts into place the critical early public health care measures to deal with the emerging pandemic; and the luminous Jennifer Ehle, as a smart CDC virologist who labors tirelessly behind the scenes to understand the nature of their deadly opponent and to devise a vaccine to defeat it.

What makes these stories so engaging is not only that they weave important and realistic medical science roles into the multifaceted plot of the ensemble film, but also that the woman executing them do so with compassion and unassuming self-sacrifice, keeping their heads while those about them are losing theirs, creating a calm, efficient working center at the eye of the swirling global disease storm. It is also interesting to note, reversing conventional gender roles, that it is the CDC head honcho, played convincingly by Laurence Fishburne, who fumbles the ball by letting his personal attachments get in the way of his doing his job.

Off hand, I can think of only one other popular film that delivers so much unvarnished science, and that is Contact, which also happens to feature a brilliant, fearless female scientist (Jodie Foster, of course). The fact is that we learn a lot from Contagion, and the science it communicates rings true, even allowing for the concessions made to narrative compression. (For example, vaccines, in real life, do not confer immediate immunity.) This level of detail and concern for accuracy I attribute largely to director Soderbergh, whose goal was clearly to offer us an ode to medical science and to public health workers. The movie pauses for a quiet exposition on epidemiology - Winslet takes to a whiteboard to explain the mathematics of disease transmission, complete with variables and subscripts, no less - and for a meditation by Ehle at her father's bedside - a short discourse on a Nobel prize won for determining the true cause of ulcers. Can you imagine?

These digressions into the nuts and bolts of science - and there are many of them - would not have made it into a lesser script, much less the final cut of most films.That they survive and are showcased here are a testimony to Soderbergh's independence as a film maker and to his ability to realize Contagion as the remarkable personal vision that it appears to be.