Rust and Bone
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Written by Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain
with Matthais Shoenaerts, Marion Cotillard, Bouli Lanners
2012
High hopes for this one after A Prophet (Audiard’s excellent 2009 crime epic), and though it doesn’t quite reach those heights, it by no means disappoints. It’s a sprawling yet intense tale of love, loss and dependencies of all kinds, full of striking images and repeating visual motifs, and articulating the extremes of emotion without ever breaking into melodrama.
We meet Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hulking whale of a man of inconsistent responsibility, as he struggles to travel with no money and Sam, his young son. He’s moving in with his sister and her husband so they can help look after the child while he finds work. There’s a suggestion that his son was being mistreated while he was living with his mother, and the love and care Ali feels towards him is obvious, though it doesn’t always manifest itself in the best behaviour. While Sam is enrolled in a local school, Ali finds work as a bouncer at a nightclub, where he meets Steph (Marion Cotillard), after she gets in a fight. He takes her home and makes sure she’s OK, leaves his number in case she needs anything, and goes. He hears from her again months later after she is involved in a life-changing accident, and ends up helping her more than he ever could have foreseen.
A battle between self-reliance and responsibility runs through this film, as the two leads learn to trust and rely on each other, and to accept the extent they each need to do so. Audiard deals with both abject tragedy and touching emotion with the same calm, distant, yet sympathetic air, and it makes for a powerful drama. He can do this because he can place so much of the story in the hands of the two lead performances; Cotillard and Schoenaerts work together beautifully, both flawed and broken in their own ways, and both crying out for help while refusing to be remotely needy. Schoenaerts in particular charms with an unwieldy gentleness, behind which lurks a capacity for anger and violence that occasionally gets pointed in the wrong direction.
If there’s a problem with the film it’s that there’s almost too much going on, and it sometimes becomes unclear exactly whose story is being focused on. It’s never dull by any means, but it feels much longer than two hours, and there’s definitely a section in the last act with a sensation of one incident too many. In spite of this you never stop wanting to find out what happens next to the characters even if the plot itself starts to feel a bit superfluous. And the understated revelation at the end makes it all worthwhile.
Tom
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