Jacques Audiard showed himself to be a filmmaker willing to take bold steps in daring directions with 2009’s celebrated A PROPHET. With RUST AND BONE he journeys further into the inner workings of damaged souls, taking a grotty wander through the harshness of overcoming physical and mental roadblocks. An amalgamation of Canadian writer Craig Davidson’s set of stories, Audiard’s latest meets perseverance with down-and-dirty life reassessments, mixing together a gruff and sometimes inconsistent cocktail of moral hardships that are as uneven as they are relentlessly tragic.
Matthias Schoenaerts (the star of BULLHEAD, Belgium’s Foreign Language Oscar entry) weaves the robustness of his rugged stature through his performance as a mostly unlikable, hot-headed brute who finds it difficult to cap his cantankerous rage. He plays Ali, a man searching for a home for himself and his malnourished five-year-old son Sam (Armand Verdure). Imposing on his estranged sister and quickly finding work as a bouncer in a Côte d’Azur nightclub, Ali meets (and saves) Stephanie (courageously performed by Marion Cotillard), a self-destructive beauty who trains killer whales at a local marine park.
After losing both her legs in a tragic accident, Stephanie recalls the kindness of Ali’s stranger and turns to him for help in her new and drastically altered life. Fused together by mutual understanding and a desire to fulfil gaping loneliness, Ali and Stephanie embark on a relationship that gives each other a gratifying and sexual light at the end of their dark, struggling tunnels.
Cutting from one emotionally fraught and powerfully shot incident to the next creates a merciless smorgasbord of unsubtle tragedy, uneasily gelled together with little payoff.
Although somewhat marred by a rhapsodic and manipulative use of music (most significantly Audiard’s utilisation of that age-old trick of cutting disturbing scenes with jovial music), RUST AND BONE is, for the most part, a candid and visually audacious work from Audiard. The screenplay he co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain is imbued with an intense treatment of the melodrama Davidson’s stories provide. Yet, as much as the film shows the hardships faced by the two initially unsympathetic – but engrossing – protagonists, it mirrors the piecemeal nature of its source material. Cutting from one emotionally fraught and powerfully shot incident to the next creates a merciless smorgasbord of unsubtle tragedy, uneasily gelled together with little payoff.
Wringing out as much pathos from the absorbing and hopeful narrative as possible, RUST AND BONE is a muddy slice of urban disease set in a world where happiness is something only rewarded to the strong and determined – but even then is easily stripped away by the inescapable nature of life’s punishing coincidences.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRQyuzcg_Pk
I can’t agree: if Ali were ‘a mostly unlikable, hot-headed brute who finds it difficult to cap his cantankerous rage’, as against rather gruff (a word used, but not applied to him) and too set on his own goals to avoid hurting others when they come in between, he would not have ‘said something’ to Stéphanie such that she both contacts him and continues seeing him. The film wouldn’t work if he is not more likeable than suggested.