Movie Chile Review

Rust and Bone

By: Jonathan Richards
Published online: Friday, January 18, 2013
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

Writer-director Jacques Audiard brings together two damaged characters in a drama of self-discovery. Tough guy Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is self-centered and a bit brutish, but not a bad sort. Cool, beautiful, Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) is head orca trainer at Marineland in Antibes, till she loses both legs at the knee to a killer whale. Ali has a 5-year-old son, with whom he is careless and disengaged, as he is with Stéphanie. But he helps her get back on her feet, so to speak, and their relationship develops. Audiard mixes brutishness and poetry, mostly to good effect, but loses the ending to sentimentality. Rated R. 120 minutes. In French with subtitles.

Full Review

Rust and Bone, drama, in French with subtitles, rated R, Regal DeVargas, 3 chiles

If ever you’re having a really bad day — the flu lingering, the toilet overflowing, the car going ka-plock ka-plock — just remind yourself that things could be worse. You could have had your legs bitten off by a killer whale.

That’s the kind of day Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), the head orca trainer at Marineland in Antibes, has. One moment she’s putting the great seagoing mammals through their paces, persuading them to leap from the pool in tandem with water cascading from their massive black-and-white bodies. The next, all hell has broken loose, and she wakes up in the hospital with nothing left from the knees down.

Cotillard is one of only two women — the other was Sophia Loren, for Two Women — to win a best-leading-actress Oscar for a foreign-language role (as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose). She is a hell of an actress, and she makes you feel the anguish of that moment of discovery deep in your gut. She goes through shock and harrowing depression. For a long time she keeps to her room, shades drawn, seeing no one.

But she’s a tough girl, and gradually she begins to pull herself out of it. And one day she picks up the phone and calls Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a nightclub bouncer she met one night when he saved her from a brawl. They don’t really know each other, but he gave her his phone number, and something about him stuck in her mind.

We’ve met Ali before. The film opens with him on a train with his 5-year-old son, Sam (Armand Verdure), heading for Antibes. They’re broke. “I’m hungry,” the boy complains, and Ali scavenges the train car for half-eaten sandwiches and bags of chips. They make a pretty good meal of it, too — it’s eye-opening how much food gets left behind by travelers on the Côte d’Azure.

Ali is a bruiser and a brute. But he’s not devoid of all moral compass. We gather that the reason he’s taken custody of the kid is that his mother was using him to smuggle drugs. Still, Ali is not much of a dad. He keeps forgetting to pick up Sam at school and is generally pretty lax about keeping an eye on him. They crash with his sister and her husband, and she helps him get the bouncer job. Pretty soon he moves on to work as a security guard, and moonlights for a shady guy named Martial (Bouli Lanners) who installs surreptitious video equipment for businesses to spy on their employees.

When Stéphanie calls, Ali comes over, and a relationship begins to develop between the tough guy and the wounded woman. He gets her to eat, he gets her to smile. He takes her down to the beach, and finally convinces her to go for a swim.

We’ve been aware of her leglessness for a while by now, but this is where it knocks you over. As Ali scoops her up in his arms, and the towel falls away from her bathing-suited body, we see the naked stumps of her legs full on. My first thought was, How the #@&* did they do that? My second was, I know actors like De Niro and Christian Bale will gain or lose a lot of weight for a part, but this lady puts them to shame. This is CGI brought to a shockingly intimate level. We’re used to tsunamis, and cities being destroyed. We’re not prepared for this.

Together, they navigate stages of Stéphanie’s rehabilitation. Before, she had been a tease. “I liked turning them on,” she tells Ali. “Then I got bored.” Now, she’s not sure if the sexual equipment even still works. Ali, amiable but not a smooth talker, offers in the crudest way to help her find out. Everything seems to work fine, and it’s another major step in her return to life. The sex scenes are among the most unusual you’ll ever see on film.

Ali’s other extracurricular employment is as a bare-knuckle fighter, brawling for money in smash- mouth bouts of the kind that movies love, with the blood spewing in gelatinous sheets, not unlike the spray made by an orca breaking the surface. Stéphanie comes to the fights, and in one of the movie’s most ill-considered scenes, inspires Ali to turn the tables when he is getting the crap beaten out of him when she limps over toward the fight on her new prosthetic limbs.

But director Jacques Audiard can deal in poetry as well as rough stuff, and nowhere better than when he brings Stéphanie back for a visit to her old place of work. A moment of communion between her and an orca, possibly the one who ate her legs, through the glass wall of the Marineland tank, is as affecting as any love scene. But, as with the tiger in Life of Pi, one needs to be cautious not to go overboard ascribing human emotions to wild animals.

While Stéphanie is growing and changing, Ali is not. It will take a terrible crisis, triggered by a character flaw we’ve noted already, to shock him out of his blithe self-centeredness. In human terms, it’s a positive turn of events. In movie terms, it makes for a flabby ending to a muscular film.