Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Armand Verdure, Céline Sallette
Certificate: 15
Running Time: 123 Minutes
Special Features: Audio Commentary with Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain and Arnaud Calistri, The Making of Rust and Bone, The Special Effects of Rust and Bone, Deleted Scenes.
Director Jacques Audiard has previously been behind the powerful A PROPHET and THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED. In RUST AND BONE, we open with an introduction to Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his 5-year old son, Sam, after he’s left Belgium and headed to Antibes in France to seemingly begin a new life with his sister Anna. Ali finds work as a bouncer, and one innocuous night, comes to the aid of Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) after she’s been punched in the face at a club. Despite this being a fleeting encounter, he drives her home but Stephanie is living with someone and so all he does, is leave his phone number with her.
We’re then introduced to Stephanie’s life and her Marineland job as an Orca Whale trainer/show leader until a severe accident occurs and Stephanie ends up tragically losing the bottom half of both her legs. We then flit between their lives and out of the blue, she calls him and a chance relationship begins and gradually becomes more intimate than it ever was before.
Schoenaerts’s Ali is self-absorbed but focused on fighting and sleeping with every girl he crosses paths with, but isn’t an intolerable character at all. His physical strength intriguingly conflicts to something set back deep in his psyche, in a sense that he’d do anything to survive. Cotillard is also an immense screen presence once again, her underlying emotions as her life changes is continuously bubbling under the surface but in an appropriate naturalistic sense, she’s the core of realism in a tale that could easily surmount to cliché or the expected.
Audiard’s camera work brings us visual splendour with soft focus direction that picks out the warmth and cold of their lives quite equally, together with striking cinematography from Stéphane Fontaine. There is also the subtle, yet brilliant, dashes of Alexandre Desplat’s compositions and music accompaniment that include Bon Iver. Both elements mingle elegantly with proceedings and are a perfect complement for both lead characters lives.
What makes RUST AND BONE particularly impressive is this world of ‘feel-good’ dramas and central characters coming back from the depths; it is deeply set in reality and the admittance that it’s rarely an easy road to recovery. In a lesser film, the Whales could signify some force of nature but instead, they’re just another part of the world, like us. RUST AND BONE is a story of connection, loss, expectation and reconnection and with it, hugely gratifying and offers a beautiful passion for life.
RUST AND BONE is out today on DVD and Blu-ray. It can be ordered via this link.
