When it comes to splitting cinematic loyalties between serious foreign dramas and big budget American films, Marion Cotillard makes it look like an art. Though her recent career has landed her in the films of Christopher Nolan, Rob Marshall, Woody Allen and Stephen Soderbergh, the next film she’ll star in takes her back across the pond.
Variety reports Cotillard will play the leading role in Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit), the next film from the internationally acclaimed award-winning brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The brothers will fill both writing and directing duties.
Two Days, One Night, which is set to begin filming this summer in Belgium, will follow Cotillard as Sandra, a wife who has only a single weekend to convince her colleagues to give up their bonuses so that she may keep her job. French actor Fabrizio Rongione will play her helpful husband.
The Dardennes are following up 2011’s critically adored The Kid With a Bike (featuring Rongione), which took home the top prize at Cannes that year - though it lost the Best Foreign Language Golden Globe to A Separation.
Cotillard, meanwhile, is also in talks to star in another French drama, the latest adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid. On the American side, she should have two releases in 2013. One is the crime thriller Blood Ties, from French director Guillame Canet, which will also star Clive Owen, Mila Kunis, and Zoe Saldana. That film was written by James Gray, who directed Cotillard’s other feature, a romantic drama called Lowlife, featuring the likes of Jeremy Renner and Joaquin Phoenix.
