Director: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoienaerts, Bouli Lanners
Release Date: 26th October 2012
Rust and Bone is a boy-meets-girl story. Except it’s from the director of 2009’s prison drama The Prophet, so the boy here is a homeless bouncer/single dad with a sideline in illegal, bare-knuckle boxing matches and the girl spends her nights seducing men in nightclubs and her days training killer whales to jump through hoops. Notting Hill it is not.
Much like he did with The Prophet, Audiard balances the film on the cusp of ridiculousness while using every available soap opera cliché (freak accidents, social adversity, extremity, hope to despair) but just manages to not let it descend into crude melodrama. When its hyperactive strands eventually unite, the film becomes a strange, Gallic hybrid of Rocky and My Left Foot. However, it’s told in such a totally unique and consistently beautiful way, with two excellent lead actors, that you become completely wrapped up in its outright bizarreness. The film is all the more enjoyable for this, even if the repeated use of Orcas as phallic metaphors might be a bit much for non-French audiences.
