THREE WOMEN

Sometimes our homegrown double bills don’t seem to make sense from a programming standpoint, but they often gel in surprising and unexpected ways as they unfold, like two great tastes that, hey, taste great together. (“You got angsty social drama in my mindless chase comedy!” “Well, you got mindless chase comedy in my angsty social drama!” “Mmmmmm!”) And then sometimes, like last night’s impromptu pairing, they don’t go together at all, yet they both serve their own sweet and seasoned purposes just the same…

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Comedy is so subjective that at least the knee-jerk response to it is almost beyond criticism—you either laffs or you don’t laffs, and it’s often as simple as that. Hot Pursuit got scathing, war crime-type reviews when it came out earlier this summer-- “Painfully unfunny!” “Aggressively lazy!” “An equal-opportunity fiasco!”-- but it sure did tickle my inner yahoo, and it made me wonder how many of those reviews came prejudged. The already high-strung Reese Witherspoon is amped to the red zone as a hyper-intense cop charged with motoring Sofia Vergara, a high-profile witness who can put a Colombian drug lord in prison, to court before snarling Latin baddies and surly, corrupt Texas detectives can stop them. Of course there’s hardly a plot element in it you haven’t seen a hundred times before. But Vergara and Witherspoon are both sly, sharp comedians, and if they’ve ever made you cackle in the past—Vergara on Modern Family or in the Farrelly Brothers' take on The Three Stooges, Witherspoon in Freeway or Election or even Legally Blonde-- then this loud, enjoyably crass, deftly assembled comedy, in which the two prove to be a jolly match, should make a safe bet for more silly laffs than the average summer comedy. I pretty much thought Hot Pursuit was a riot, and without the usual clunking and wheezing-- it's breezily directed by Anne Fletcher, who a few years ago came up with the similarly surprising Sandra Bullock vehicle The Proposal.

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Marion Cottilard barley cracks a smile in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes’ latest emotional ordeal, Two Days, One Night, and why would she? She’s Sandra, a married mother of two who is about to be laid off from her job at a solar panel assembly plant, but only if her coworkers vote a hefty bonus for themselves in exchange for her firing. The film chronicles Sandra’s desperate attempt over the weekend before the final vote to individually dissuade her colleagues from accepting their short-term windfall over her long-term prospects for making ends meet, and as usual the Dardennes key us into every humiliation, writ small and muted and closed in, in Sandra’s agonizing one-on-one process of survival. At first Cottilard’s presence seems as though it might be distracting—star power is not a phrase usually associated with films made by these Belgian brothers—but she’s a marvelously intuitive and trusting actress, and each wound inflicted over this long weekend is registered on her face with tiny cuts, not broad slashes. (Those subtle wounds are also apparent in the pained body language of her coworkers, themselves forced to choose between selflessness and self-interest.) Cotillard conspires with her directors to elevate the premise beyond its masochistic foundations— in their hands, and without sentiment or heavy-handedness, the movie becomes a parable of how the experience of misery can result in self-understanding and even improbable moments of happiness. It achieves its own sort of lightness of being.

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