In the latest movie from Belgian directors Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne, Marion Cotillard plays a worker at a solar-panel plant whose depression has kept her from work for months. To save her job, she has just two days to persuade her co-workers to forego their much-needed bonus.

The Dardenne brothers — known for their scruffy, hand-held, realist aesthetic — have made another richly emotional film about friendship and community. The structure is repetitive, but designed to emphasize all the ways we react to another person in need.

The cast is excellent, particularly Timur Magomedgadzhiev as a conscience-stricken co-worker, but it’s Cotillard who’s in nearly every scene. Desperate, downtrodden, but grasping at each shred of hope, Cotillard — who won an Oscar playing Edith Piaf in 2007’s “La Vie en Rose” — carries the whole film.