Rust and Bone
★★★★
(2012)
Jacques Audiard's continues his unbroken run of spectacular dramas with this unique, touching and seriously tense love story, walking a miraculous line between the entertaining and the nearly unwatchable. Despite the awkward humanist story line which reads on paper like a thematic checklist for Hollywood awards contention, Audiard turns Rust and Bone into something which often feels like it may veer into sentiment and cliche but astonishingly it stays on its rails, sparks flying.
Adapted from a series of short stories by Canadian Craig Davidson the film initially presents us with a wandering rootless father and his waif like son. Ali, brilliantly and broodingly played by Bullhead's Matthias Schoenaerts, is running from an invisible life (at least within the content of the film) to return to his sister and her husband to start over. He finds himself in sunny Anitbes working as a security guard when he meets Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard).
When Stéphanie has a horrific accident with the Orca whales she works with at a marine park, she later, desperately and impulsively calls Ali. The relationship that Audiard builds is an unconventional wonder. Stéphanie is shy and forever changed and Ali is presented as a consistently unembarrassed and bullish pillar of strength for her to lean against, no matter where Ali goes or who he sleeps with.
As the pair get more and more entangled and as Ali regains his love of boxing, outlying aspects of the film begin to creep in, threatening to take everything from the pair. His relationship with his Son is strained, in one scene shockingly but we're strangely never felt to hold anything against him. The director briskly moves on, intent of painting a completely unbiased image of his two complex characters. But as aspects of the childish Ali's life begin to spiral out of control Audiard patiently makes us wait for his final change, but it is certainly one worth waiting for.
The french director famously spends years on his scripts and he wrings every drop from each word from the mouths of both Cotillard and Schoenarts who are both on top form here. The film flies in the face of its strangeness, filling each moment with an indescribable tension, turning the whole thing into something moving and true.
Aside from a few slip ups in pop music alongside Alexandre Desplat's beautiful score Audiards film is deeply affecting both visually and musically. It doesn't sell itself as a love story throughout but ultimately thats what it provides us in spades, without a hint of self consciousness or force. And, more than that it's a beautifully balanced and acted film, showing two amazing actors working together and two unique characters over coming the physical and mental problems in trying to simply make life work.
