Jacques Audiard has been making movies since the early 90s, but it was with his 2009 prison drama, A Prophet, that he really started turning more than just the film festival crowd’s heads here in the United States. Given his success with that film, his followup had to be seen as being hotly anticipated. Well, the followup is here, and it turns out it’s a weird little character drama about a single dad (Matthias Schoenaerts) who’s trying to make his way in the world by becoming a combatant in an underground fight club somewhat randomly stumbling into a relationship with an Orca trainer (Marion Cotillard) who loses both of her legs in a whale accident. See? I told you it was weird.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its charms though. Rust and Bone is gorgeous to look at, featuring phenomenal photography that even includes a handful of artful lens flares that weren’t overly slick and computer-generated or nothing. And Schoenaerts and Cotillard anchor the film quite well. Cotillard is dealing with melodramatic, almost shockingly over-the-top material, but she’s able to sell it well—so well that she puts any memory of her ludicrous performance in The Dark Knight Rises immediately to rest. Schoenaerts gets a less extreme character arc, but gives a performance that is no less affecting. He’s a powerful presence, and he’s always able to make his character come off as being a little unhinged and a little bit scary. Somebody failed to teach this guy maturity and responsibility, and much of the tension of the film comes from the dread of the messiness that his lack of forethought continually creates.
Ultimately, that tension doesn’t prove to be enough to keep you fully engaged in this story though. While Rust and Bone does a good job setting itself up, eventually it loses its momentum somewhere in the middle. Cotillard’s character struggles to come to grips with the loss of her legs, Schoenaerts’ struggles with the difficulties of being a self-obsessed, angry dullard... and that’s about it. There’s an exaggerated brutality to the fight scenes here, which take place in dirt and gravel and without the use of protective gloves, and even Cotillard’s whale training scenes are given the whiff of trash due to their being set to an abysmal Katie Perry song. It all seems to say, “Look at these people, they’re practically carnies, aren’t their lives terrible?” Rust and Bone gets intense in places, enough to be provocative, but there’s never a clear sense of why we’re being provoked. And other than a last minute epiphany that seems like an easy excuse for a resolution, the film can feel like suffering upon suffering, just for the sake of our voyeurism. It’s like going to a cock fight or something.
