Rust and Bone

Jacques Audiard – 2012 – France

Alternately harrowing and poignant drama about an unlikely romance between a crippled whale trainer and a down-on-his-luck boxer.  It’s the kind of thing that sounds contrived in print but the film itself – despite its pretentious title – is not about a plot gimmick; it’s entirely about its beautifully realized and realistic characters.  These two have absolutely nothing in common in terms of class, interests or personality.  While an American rom-com would likely milk the same premise for all its odd-couple potential, Jacques Audiard opts instead to have his characters do things that real people do; devoid of cliché scenarios and comic dialogue.  This is an actors’ film; Marion Cotillard as Stéphanie and Matthias Schoenaerts as Alain are so completely their characters that they become invisible and erase any memory of their work in other films.  Stéphanie is a sternly independent woman.  She loves her work but is surrounded by sensitive, middle-class people who leave her lacking something visceral in her life.  After going out dancing one night alone, she gets into a fight and is rescued by Alain, the club’s bouncer.  Driving her home, he blatantly suggests that she asked for trouble due to being dressed (in his words) as a “whore.”  Stéphanie is both offended and slightly intrigued that a man could be so uncouth in this day and age.  Alain is indeed a simple guy who doesn’t think twice about saying whatever pops into his head and has no real ability to read people.  He has a young son who he barely cares for and is content to let his sister do most of the raising.  He’s virtually clueless, and his total lack of guile is what appeals to Stéphanie, who sees him as both a symbol and specimen of pure, virile masculinity, like a caveman dropped into her sophisticated world from another era.  When she loses her lower legs in a workplace accident, she remembers Alain and gets in touch with him again, perhaps feeling that her recent trauma has either awakened something primal in her or at least functioned as a wake-up call to take charge of her life rather than let it happen to her.  Since fighting is his only valuable skill, Alain soon takes work in an illegal fight ring, which alternately horrifies and arouses Stéphanie, who eventually becomes his de facto fight manager.  As a couple negotiating through flirtation, friendship, sex and dealing with Stéphanie’s injuries and Alain’s obtuseness, they have a hard time and a hard road ahead.  The film offers no promises that these two are soul-mates and will remain together forever; it merely shows how each of them allows the other, at crucial moments, to influence them for the better to one degree or another.