Film Review | Rust and Bone

Rust and Bone is a deeply strange film. But you may only realise well past its halfway mark, so quietly engrossing is Jacques Audiard's film about fractured lives precariously on the mend.

For the most part, you'll be busy being caught up in what is essentially a high-end melodrama. Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is an impoverished single father looking for work in the south of France with his young son in tow, sometimes resorting to theft just to get through the day. Eventually forced to crash with his sister - the supermarket cashier is hardly flush herself - he finds work as a bouncer at a local club.

Having stepped in to stop a fight involving an attractive orca trainer, Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), Ali ends up escorting her home and facing her bemused boyfriend.

Their paths intersect again when tragedy strikes: Stephanie suffers an accident on the job when one of the show whales strays from its trajectory and saws off both of her legs. A quiet, gradual bond begins to simmer among the will-they-won't-they couple, but although Stephanie is conflicted about where she wants to take the relationship herself, it's clear that Ali isn't the type to commit so readily.

Meanwhile, he seems to be heading into murkier and murkier waters - accepting to participate in illegal boxing fights for easy cash, as well as helping out a colleague on a shady security detail that allows employers to spy on their workers.

So yeah. It's a story about an impoverished, working-class lowlife who gets into a relationship with an emotionally fragile, middle-class amputee. In other words, it's the stuff of tawdry-as-hell soap operas, and the real miracle here is that you not only forget about all that, but that genuine emotion actually suffuses the entire film from start to finish.

This is down to two things: perfectly on-note performances by both of our leads and Audiard's effortless, naturalistic touch. The director of that other French hit, 'Un Prophete' (2009), knows enough not to unnecessarily highlight an already highly emotive scenario.

Instead, he lets his camera linger and rove over what really connects our leads: they are broken people, and the process of their recovery is all the more intriguing for being both uncertain and intertwined. It's unclear why they orbit around each other so instantly, but Audiard makes us believe that this is the way these things tend to happen - that this is the way of ever-unpredictable human behaviour.

It's also a directly parallel story - Stephanie and Ali are equally our protagonists, which fortunately gives Cotillard and Schoenaerts more than enough elbow room to etch out all of their nuances.

Cotillard is a winner here for giving us a performance that's both generous and understated. She is the victim of a tragedy, but that doesn't mean she's entirely sympathetic - she confesses to an unhealthy appetite for male attention, and she never appears to be quite as emotionally stable as she could be. You expect Cotillard to do that half-smile-with-crinkly-eyes thing, and yes, we get a lot of that.

But there's a lot more to her performance: simmering anger, disappointment, hope. All delivered through minimal dialogue, too. She inspires at least one goosebump moment. With a stone-faced glare, she unexpectedly steps in to help out Ali, and she succeeds. It's a performance that invites drinking in, and it will doubtlessly reap plenty of rewards upon a rewatch.

But if Stephanie is a flawed character, Ali is downright infuriating. Not only is he morally suspect, he's also clearly not very bright (when his enraged sister asks him whether he has "sawdust on his head" you're inclined to think that, yeah, he kinda does).

Schoenaerts's performance doesn't redeem the character one bit - exposing all of his seams and tatters - but this only opens the drama up to further tension and exploration. His is a masculinity both fierce and fragile: he is flinching child and angry beast rolled into one. In the contemporary mainstream scenario, it's Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender who come close to a similarly sensitive portrayal of the masculine condition. But it is only the likes of Marlon Brando who has genuinely mined a similarly complex furrow.

With a shrewd (but never overbearing) eye towards economic, as well as psychological realities, Audiard has created a pulsating organ of a film. Its execution is just polished enough to prevent it from spilling into embarrassing melodrama and just messy enough to allow its knotted, prickly characters to unravel.

If the final arc edges it perhaps too closely to Hollywood Oscar-baiting fare, we get more than enough to chew on earlier on. Because when you establish a genuine connection with the grotesque narrative of a melodrama, something strange - and wonderful - begins to happen before your very eyes.

See Rust and Bone at the St James Cavalier cinema, Valletta, on July 8-9 (18:30) and 10-14 (20:45).