When I saw the preview for Rust and Bone, a French film directed by Jacques Audiard, my interest was immediately piqued. The preview was a sequence of striking images, scored by emotional music, with a subtext of evocative themes. By the end of it, I’d marked it in my head as a film I wanted to see but then suddenly realized that, even though I felt viscerally stimulated, I had no idea what the movie was about. I liked something there, even though what I got from it were scattered but pleasing fragments that didn’t seem to fit together. This was a foreshadowing.
Rust and Bone opens with Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) scavenging food for him and his young son on the train they’re taking to stay with Ali’s sister and brother-in-law in Antibes. Soon, he scores a job as a bouncer at a club and there meets Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), an Orca whale trainer. He saves her after she is hit by a man and takes her home where he finds out she has a boyfriend. Ali and Stephanie don’t see each other again until she calls him one desperate night after a whale training accident, which leads to the amputation of both of her legs. Seeing her as a conquest like any other girl, he accepts the call and they end up spending time together. He takes her swimming, the one activity, which seems to liberate her, and she accompanies him to Fight Club-style muscle fests where he earns a partial living from people betting on him.
Visually, the film is inventive and sometimes striking, alternating between watery blues, orange, grainy passages, and shots of, usually Cotillard’s character, as bleached-out bright light. A short way into the film, one realizes that they’re seeing a visual interpretation of “rust” and “bone,” and it’s genuinely beautiful at times.
The film is also sonically, artistically ambitious, playing especially with sounds of breathing, water, and music. Audiard constructs a sonically primal world, in which the characters live out the primary theme: men are beasts and women tame the beast – although, in the end, the film seems to say that the most pleasing specimens have a little of both the beast and the tamer in them.
In so far as the acting is concerned, the main characters all offer deft performances. Schoenaerts plays the self-absorbed cavemanesque Ali convincingly. He’s not afraid to be deadened, brutish and dislikeable, and it works. Cotillard, already a star of French and American cinema, steals the show. It would be difficult to be a more understated actress than Cotillard in this part. A couple times the director writes her into scenes in an overblown way, as when she’s supposed to dance around in her apartment in her wheelchair, but she as the actor is relaxed and submerged into the character throughout.
All this being said, the film falls short of its intention. The fundamental challenge of the film is that it’s based on a book in which the characters go on truly extreme physical and emotional journeys. It seems that the journeys are too profound and complex to be covered in this two-hour film. The most obvious testament to this theory being that Ali’s life-altering experience occurs 15 minutes before the film concludes, with not even close to enough time to believably demonstrate his ostensible transformation.
The secondary challenge to the movie is that, while both lead actors are wonderful inside of their own characters, they seem to completely lack alchemy together. I’d go so far as to say it was like they were acting in two separate movies, so distant did they seem from each other. Separately, they’re smoldering, but they don’t smolder to, or at, or with each other. To be fair, they are both playing characters who either have very little emotional content or struggle to suppress it. Nevertheless, that hardness should have created a friction and a jarring kind of chemistry. Instead, there was nothing. Each of them acted their characters side-by-side and just happened to be on the same screen together.
One could easily extrapolate that lack of synthesis between the characters to explain Rust and Bone as a whole piece. The cinematography and sound are lovely. The acting is true and compelling. The events of the story are gripping. But when you put the parts together, they don’t resonate with each other. It’s difficult to say if the film tried too hard or too little, but either way it falls apart.