Beauty and the Bull

Rust and Bone

** out of ****

Directed by: Jacques Audiard

Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Armand Verdue and Celine Sellette

Running time: 126 minutes

Witnessing a relationship where the couple shows few signs of compatibility is not just painful in real life, but also in the movies. The main problem with Rust and Bone, the latest film from French writer/director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet), is how often the female lead is maligned by both the male love interest and the script.

Audiard and co-writer Thomas Bidegain adapt the film from two short stories by Canadian writer and amateur boxer Craig Davidson. The director tries to merge Davidson’s stories together and find common ground between their protagonists – played by the beautiful Marion Cotillard and the beefy Matthias Schoenaerts – but these opposites do not attract or fit together convincingly.

Schoenaerts is Ali, a broke Parisian and petty thief taking care of his five-year-old son. At the film’s start, the duo scrounges for leftover lunch food on a train. Ali ends up getting a job as a bouncer at a throbbing Côte d'Azur nightclub. One night, he breaks up a brawl involving a fragile French girl, Stephanie (Cotillard), and decides to drive her home. She is a Marineland orca trainer with a bruised home life.

Those wounds seem minimal after a disaster at the stage show where Stephanie performs, when a killer whale pounces on the set and it collapses. A haunting, nearly soundless underwater shot shows Stephanie floating with her two legs nearly ripped apart. Her legs are later removed, subjecting Stephanie to a wheelchair in her dim apartment. She calls Ali for support and the two start to bond.

The film’s title comes from a description in one of Davidson’s stories about the taste a fighter feels when he is punched in the mouth. It relates to Ali, who participates in grueling mano-a-mano brawls with other men in the countryside to pay off his debts. The title, however, can also refer to the characters: the rust signifies Stephanie’s deterioration, while the bone refers to Ali’s physicality.

Schoenaerts is a talented actor trapped inside a thin character. He is a large screen presence, with gentle eyes and a fighter’s grip, and an intensity in his face that epitomizes his character’s struggle. 

Ali is the furthest thing from a generous and responsible man, though: he hits his kid, takes advantage of his co-workers (in a mired subplot that could have been cut), and eventually looks at Stephanie as a lover instead of offering her the companionship she direly needs.

This deeply flawed characterization can only work if Ali transforms into a responsible character by the end. However, his changes are minor. He is merely a sensitive thug who gets a release through carnal pleasures and is often unfazed by Stephanie’s disability.

Stephanie and Ali are both battered characters – her physically and him financially – trying to regain control over their lives. The climax of the film, which uses a frightening although predictably set-up accident scene to bring them together, wraps up their rocky relationship too quickly, betraying the rougher contrasts in characterization that came earlier.

Audiard mistakenly focuses the film on the almost cartoonishly inept Ali instead of Stephanie, since the best scenes in Rust and Bone belong to Cotillard, a full-bodied performer who distracts from her onscreen disability (the legs are convincingly eliminated with CGI). As she sits in her apartment, alone, overlooking the sparkling waters of the sea, she longs for a life without pain. Cotillard brings out this dreariness without uttering a word.

The film’s technical qualities are top-notch, but can only service Rust and Bone so much. Alexandre Desplat’s score simmers underneath the beaten characters, with minor keys and horns addressing their solitude. 

Meanwhile, two buoyantly optimistic pop songs – “Love Shack” by the B-52s and Katy Perry’s “Firework” – track Stephanie’s remedial process. She wheels around her tiny apartment to the beats of the former tune, then performs her aquatic show routine (done to “Firework”) as her body regains its composure.

In a late scene in the film, Stephanie returns to the aquarium and comes face-to-face with the giant killer whale that mangled her, a pane of glass separating the two. The camera lingers on Stephanie’s hand as it touches the glass. The orca swims right to her. 

It is a captivating moment, as Stephanie wrestles with venturing back into a world of potential danger and peril. The beast that submerged her underneath and tore her body apart could, in this circumstance, be a symbol for Ali.

The characters in the film are tough and headstrong, but the writing fails to make one believe that a relationship between these damaged souls can work. It is hard to become engaged in a romance when we cannot root for the lopsided relationship at the centre.