Stars: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Armand Verdure, Celine Sallette, Corinne Masiero
Director: Jacques Audiard
Oscar History: No nominations (though it did receive Foreign Language Film and Best Actress nominations at the Golden Globes)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
The expectations game is a dangerous thing when it comes to movies you're coming across for the first time, and it's one that as hard as we try to avoid it, it still comes back, influencing us when we don't want it. I will admit that, with Rust & Bone, my expectations were not high-I had read some abysmal reviews of the film (apparently the critics I frequent were the few exceptions here, as the film has a generally high Rotten Tomatoes score), and was expecting something dark (I also read two very incorrect spoiler alerts on the film, so who knows what the internet was thinking on that) and a bit scant. What I ended up with was a relatively brisk, while not masterpiece, certainly a film worth investigating.(Things tend to spoil) The movie is the story of two people, Stephanie (Cotillard) and Ali (Schoenaerts), two people who meet by happenstance and are drawn further into each other by tragedy. The film starts with Ali trying to start a new life with his son, who is mostly an afterthought in his life, and the only reason he has come to him is that the boy's mother was using the son as a drug mule (talk about the therapy bills for this kid). He gets a job both as a security guard and as someone hired to spy on coworkers (which eventually gets his sister fired since she steals expired yogurt-I thought that entire story line was so ancillary that I figured I would just get it out of the way right now so that we can get to the pertinent parts of the movie).
He also gets a job as a bouncer, and is introduced to Cotillard as he is trying to protect her, and later in the night, sleep with her. Cotillard, all magnetic beauty and sultry flirting, manages to resist, but is clearly drawn to the guy (have you seen Schoenaerts? Hot damn, indeed!). However, she's beautiful and enjoys making men fall all over her, but not sealing the deal. Her life, however, is forever changed when, in an accident, she has her legs chopped off by a killer whale (she's a whale trainer), and we get to see how a once rapturous woman is dismissed by society when she is handicapped by an accident.
The movie is at its best when it's trying to sort out the puzzle of Stephanie's life, and when it is trying to deal with her increasingly complicated relationship with both her future and with finding love when she has always said "in the future" to that question. Schoenaerts, whose motivations remain rather primal, eventually finds himself her friend, and after a while, becomes her lover, but nothing more than that. In one of the most brilliantly awkward moments in a movie I saw this year, after establishing their relationship as "friends with benefits," we see the look on Cotillard's face when Schoenaerts picks up another woman at the bar, and goes home with her, leaving Stephanie stranded at the bar, no longer able to get hit on to get her revenge. She used to be the one making others jealous, and is loathing the other foot (terrible choice of words, I'll admit) at this point.
The film wouldn't work if Cotillard wasn't so capable of keeping her character true to the woman we met at the beginning of the film. The reveal that she lost her legs was always going to be a stunner (and is totally a believable reaction), but it's the subsequent combination of bitter and intrigue that keeps you coming back to her performance. She remains uninhibited, and may be more attracted to Ali's interest in her physically than anything else about him-he reminds her of being beautiful and desired, and that's what she needs.
Schoenaerts, as well, keeps his character very grounded in being a real, oftentimes unlikable being. While he retains his sense of swagger and confidence to seduce anything around him, he also knows that he is failing in life: as a father, as a brother, and as someone trying to carve a future for himself. Instead, he consoles himself with a string of validating sexual encounters with women who will throw themselves at him after just looking at him, and with the money that he earns by pushing his aggression at the world onto other men in no-holds-barred style boxing matches.
The boxing matches (Oscar's favorite sport) had me wondering a little bit if France made the wrong choice in going with The Intouchables as their (unsuccessful) entry into the Foreign Language Film race (by far the most shocking omission this year for that race, considering that France had two domestic hits on its hand). Of course, The Intouchables was a global phenom, but I'll leave you with the thought of: if France had submitted Rust & Bone, do you think it would have gotten another nomination Oscar nod, or do you think that this was always a losing battle?
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