Whale of a time…
Fresh from wowing audiences at Cannes and winning
Best Film at this year’s London Film Festival, A Prophet
director Jacques Audiard’s latest film, Rust And Bone, is a
curiously unsatisfying mash-up of the sublime short stories of Canadian author
Craig Davidson. Liberally adapting
and colliding Davidson’s Rocket Ride and
the titular Rust And Bone, Audiard has fashioned a ramshackle,
episodic romance which hits just more than it misses.
Homeless, down-on-his-luck fighter Ali (Matthias
Schoenaerts) migrates from Belgium to the Cote D’Azur
with his estranged young son where he sets up home in his sister’s garage and
soon finds work as a bouncer in a local club. Breaking up a fight one night he meets the mercurial
Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) and gives her his number. When Stephanie, a killer whale trainer
at the local Marineland, is left a double leg amputee after a tragic accident,
she finds herself turning to Ali for support. The two are drawn to each other, form a tentative
friendship, Ali reawakening in Stephanie an appetite and appreciation of life,
forcing her to come to terms with her disabilities. She in turn comes to manage him in the underground
bare-knuckle bouts he fights. But
when sex and the possibility of real love threaten are either of these damaged
individuals ready for it?
Melodramatic, obvious and sentimental, Rust And
Bone, like it’s predecessor, the vastly over-rated A
Prophet, is curiously uninvolving despite being punctuated by
moments of poetic beauty and featuring a magnetic performance from Matthias
Schoenaerts as the almost Neanderthal streetfighter Ali and a possible career
best from Cotillard as the beautiful, brittle, wounded Stephanie. The scene where, after her first
post-accident sexual encounter, a reinvigorated but wheelchair-bound Stephanie
goes through her former Marineland dance routine alone on a rooftop accompanied
by Katy Perry’s Firework is fantastic; a beautiful,
life-affirming, joyous moment. But
it’s also a bit cheesy, a bit heavy-handed. And there lies one of the film’s most glaring problems; like
Ali, it lumbers when it should dance, an emotional juggernaut determined to
make you feel.
The script by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain lacks
the subtlety of Davidson’s writing, it’s bruised humanity, it’s melancholy,
it’s steel. Often compared to
Chuck Palahniuk, Davidson writes about lives lived on the margins of society,
his often brutal stories populated by broken boxers, dog fighters, sex addicts,
gamblers, drunks, bad parents, injured children. He tells tales of love, of loss, of regret, of wasted lives
and missed opportunities, of the siren song of self-destruction. His characters aren’t always likable
but they’re sympathetic and real.
By comparison, despite the committed performances of Cotillard and
Schoenaerts, Audiard and Bidegain’s characters feel a little shallow, a little
surface. They lack the depth of
their literary counterparts.
Cotillard’s Stephanie may have had her legs bitten off by a whale but
the film seems to suggest none of her problems are so bad they can’t be sorted
out by a damn good seeing to. Ali
may be a violent thug and a shitty father but all he needs to straighten up is
a near-tragic accident and an impossible shot at the title. They don’t convince as people and so
their romance never really rings true.
It’s a sentimental, melodramatic exercise in predictability. The film feels contrived, aimless, unfocused.
Audiard’s Rust And Bone never
truly explores, or even addresses, the fascinating allure of violence, the
doomy inevitability of self-destruction or the masochistic desire for
punishment that permeates Davidson’s writing. There’s a couple of perfunctory, scrappy, bare-knuckle bouts
in car parks but no real sense of anything being at stake; these are not the
life or death contests, the human cockfights, they should be but are more like
a Friday night punch-up down the kebab shop with even less at risk. The short story’s ending has been
drastically reimagined to provide a manipulative, feel-good, redemptive climax
to the film, one full of hope, that feels tacked on and worst of all, like a
betrayal of the characters.
Flabby and disappointing, Rust And Bone
underwhelms when it should overpower.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Fabien Baïardi, David Billaud, Océane Cartia and Katia Chaperon
Genres:
Drama, Mystery
Language:
French
Runtime:
2 hours 3 minutes
Certificate:
15
Rating:
3/5
UK Release Date:
Friday 2nd November
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