De rouille et d’os
Jacques Audiard (2012)
Rust and Bone sounds, and often is, grim – sometimes determinedly so. (I don’t understand what the rust refers to.) It’s disappointing that the director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet is so repeatedly ready to sacrifice credibility for instant dramatic effect. Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) is a killer-whale trainer; after an accident at the Marineland where she works in Antibes, she lies in a hospital bed. The bed’s complete isolation on the screen is an image of the situation Stéphanie has been left in; the bluish lighting is a wanly unhappy reminder of the blue water of the Marineland pool. Stéphanie recovers consciousness to find that both her legs have been amputated below the knee; not surprisingly, she’s hysterically upset. One of her work colleagues rushes in to comfort her but there isn’t a medic in sight: it’s incredible that a patient in a modern French hospital who’d suffered injuries of this kind would be allowed to regain consciousness and discover her loss in such terrifying aloneness. The emotional highs in Rust and Bone are no less contrived than the more numerous lows. When the protagonist Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) meets up again with Stéphanie for the first time since her accident, she’s living a miserable, wheelchair-bound existence. It seems she’s not been out of her apartment for ages. (Here too her metaphorical solitariness is translated implausibly into reality: for example, there’s mention of her brothers in that hospital sequence but there’s never a sign of them.) Stéphanie asks Ali if the flat stinks and he says it does ‘a bit’. ‘It’s me’, replies Stéphanie, ‘I stink’. He persuades her to come out and they go down to the sea front, which is empty. He goes for a swim. Then she does. (While it’s unusual to praise a European arthouse film for its special effects, it has to be said that whatever’s been done to cut Marion Cotillard’s legs off at the knee is amazing.) It all becomes so relaxed that she stays in the sea unsupervised while he falls asleep on the beach, which fills up with people. When Ali wakes up and carries Stephanie on his back from the water back through the crowd, this woman who, a couple of hours ago, didn’t dare face the light of the day is quite unfazed by the nervous looks she’s getting from other bathers.
Jacques Audiard creates many striking images, especially images of water and what goes on underwater (and, in a startling sequence late in the film, under ice). He gets from his leads naturalistic acting of a very high order. The combination of these two things will be enough to convince the many admirers of Rust and Bone (which won the Best Film award at last month’s London Film Festival) that realistic plotting is of little importance. Yet again, I think it is and that it’s lazy to depend essentially on an actual world and the events in it but to jettison realism when it’s easier to ignore it. The tale – as Audiard tells it anyway (his and Thomas Bidegain’s screenplay is adapted from a short story collection by the Canadian writer Craig Davidson) – is rich in further improbabilities. Ex-boxer Ali supplements his earnings, as a security guard, in bare-knuckle fist fights: on one occasion, he’s being bloodily mauled by an opponent and Stéphanie, with whom he’s having a sexual relationship by now, is so alarmed that she gets out of the car from which she’s watching and makes her way over to the fight on her prosthetic limbs. This so inspires Ali that, in a few screen seconds, he’s trounced the man who was beating him to near-death. Later on, when his manager (Bouli Lanners) has to take leave of absence, Stéphanie briefly takes over in the role! We know that Ali regularly has ‘quick fucks’ (Stéphanie’s words) with women he doesn’t expect to see again. But, when the pair go back to the night club where they first met (before her accident, when he was working as a bouncer there), you just don’t believe that Ali would be so callous as to leave her and go off with another woman he’s picked up, on the dance floor that’s out of bounds to Stéphanie. You do believe that Audiard must have an ulterior motive – must be using this unlikelihood to get through to another highlight. Sure enough, another man tries to pick up Stéphanie; when she declines and gets up to leave, the startled man clumsily apologises – ‘I didn’t know … I didn’t realise’ – and she gets violently angry.
Marion Cotillard’s (likely-to-be-Oscar-nominated) performance is finely controlled; she’s so confident in her expressivity that she’s able to get across a good deal with little evident effort, and her gestures are beautifully defined. It’s Matthias Schoenaerts, though, whose portrait of Ali provides the genuinely interesting elements of Rust and Bone. Ali has arrived in Antibes from Belgium with his young son Sam (Armand Verdure), to stay with his elder sister Anna (Corinne Masiero) and her husband (Jean-Michel Correia), who live on a shoestring. (I wasn’t clear what had happened to Sam’s mother or whether Ali was married to her.) Schoenaerts is physically convincing in the role, and very good at conveying Ali’s physical needs and appetites. Not just sex: running and fighting and working in the gym also seem to be his oxygen. You understand why Ali becomes both so important and so troubling to Stéphanie: he’s an unusual combination (in a film character) of kindness and selfishness. He’s also thoughtless in the sense that he’s not well equipped for thinking: when Stéphanie asks Ali what she means to him, Matthias Schoenaerts shows you that Ali really doesn’t know; Ali’s casual treatment of his son is more upsetting because it’s clearly not intentionally hurtful. It’s at moments like these that Ali approaches comparison with the characters played by Romain Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped and by Tahar Rahim in A Prophet. Corinne Masiero is excellent as the worn down, harassed Anna and Armand Verdure very likeable as Sam. The film has a happy ending. This is a relief – audiences will likely feel they’ve earned it after the large quota of preceding misery – yet the conclusion to Rust and Bone is as imposed as nearly all its other big moments.
3 November 2012
