RUST AND BONE
Rust and Bone
The love story in the French film Rust and Bone comes with a strange combination of gritty realism and poetic unlikelihood; maybe not rust and bone exactly, but something like it. It’s the story of a trainer of killer whales at a marine park in the south of France who loses her legs in an accident, and of a callous — though not uncaring — thug who floats through life alternately taking part in brutal back-alley boxing matches and having casual sex with whatever woman is handy.
The usual question — can they find happiness? — is somewhat short-circuited in the realistic filmmaking by French auteur Jacques Audiard ( A Prophet). Rust and Bone has the hand-held, sliceof-life feeling of many European films, even though it has a larger wedge of Hollywood sugar than it would care to admit to.
It’s anchored by a memorable performance by Marion Cotillard — still France’s gamin de jour — as Stephanie, who has orcas jumping at her command during the day but heads off to dangerous nightclubs in the evenings. An accident at work results in her losing both legs below the knee, a disaster made believable by seamless special effects, and her journey from wheelchair to artificial limbs becomes a strange combination of despair, eroticism and collapsed practicality. Watching Stephanie crawling across the floor of her apartment — it’s easier than a wheelchair — gives you a matter-of-fact appreciation for her courage. Rust and Bone keeps the sentimentality out of it, at least until the end.
The man is Ali (the compelling Matthias Schoenaerts), who takes his five-year-old son Sam (Armand Verdure) from an irresponsible mother — there are hints that she used him to smuggle drugs — and hitchhikes to Antibes to live with his working-class sister. A former boxer, and a man not given much to self-reflection, he gets a job as a bouncer at the very club that Stephanie frequents and rescues her one night from a beating.
The film keeps the sentimentality out of it, at least until the end
Later, after her accident, she calls him, a development that is never fully explained in the screenplay (the film is based on a book of short stories by Canadian Craig Davidson.)
There seems to be little attraction between Ali and Stephanie beyond his calm acceptance of her handicap: A scene where they go to Cannes and swim together in the sea has an easygoing tone — he lifts her in and out of the Mediterranean with hardly a thought of her incomplete body — even though he has been seen admiring her legs at their first meeting.
It’s a kind of romance best expressed when he asks her if she wants to have sex so she can see “if it still works.” It does, and he puts himself on call as an occasional lover, during the times when he’s not having similarly casual sex with other women or driving to fights in empty lots where gangs of men stand around betting on the outcome as two hulks pound each other bloody. Stephanie comes along to these fights, and she beams proudly. He’s the large and somewhat exotic mammal she cannot train.
Indeed, the two characters themselves are an eccentric combination who seem at once ill-suited and inevitable: it’s amazing how quickly we become used to the sight of half of a woman’s leg thrust up into the air during the film’s several erotic encounters. The real astonishment, though, arrives in a scene when Stephanie returns to the marine park and faces a whale in the blue water on the other side of a plate of glass, a creature of beautiful power that nonetheless swims and nods at her signal.
Behind the layers of symbolism lies another story. Like many European directors, Audiard uses cinema as a vehicle for social commentary, and Rust and Bone takes place in a collapsing economy where employees are secretly videotaped by their companies. The workers at the bottom of the ladder are the real victims in the film, and when the movie strays from its considerations of amputation and whales for a climax that takes place under the ice of a snowy Europe far from the sea, it feels as if their cause that has been betrayed to the higher calling of melodrama. Rust and Bone opens Dec. 21 in Toronto and Vancouver before expanding across the country Jan. 11.