Rust and Bone

Film (2012)

With Marion Cotillard (Stéphanie), Matthias Schoenaerts (Alain van Versch), Armand Verdure (Sam), Céline Sallette (Louise), Corinne Masiero (Anna), Bouli Lanners (Martial)

Alain van Versch (Matthias Schoenaerts), or Ali as he is called in this film, leaves Belgium with his young son, Sam, to find a new life in Antibes, a resort town on the Côte d’Azur between Nice and Cannes on the French Riviera, not too far from Italy. Down and out, he struggles to make ends meet, eventually finding success as a fighter. He encounters Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful orca trainer, and, after she has an extremely challenging experience, their friendship and connection grows.

Marion Cotillard is a very good actress who manages, in each of her films, to project considerably different personas. In the film that put her on the map, as Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (2007), Cotillard embodied the frail and vulnerable French chanteuse utterly charmingly and convincingly. More recently, in Little White Lies (2010), she was an inscrutably alluring, middle-aged Parisian. And in the plague-thriller, Contagion (2011), she played a captivatingly dedicated and heroic epidemiologist.

In the role of Ali, Matthias Schoenarts is a rough and tumble teddy bear, a harder-edged Liam Neeson type. While maintaining a stoic appearance, he does a good job of conveying desperation, friendship, passion and devotion.

This is a hard-edged film about people in difficult straits. The unlikeliness of its liaisons makes it interesting, as does the unexpectedness of their successes when they occur.

Ali has a young son, Sam, and we get a convincing sense of the intensity of his father-feeling, even at times when we question his parental judgment. There is something of a similarity here to the rough and tumble love that the father shows for the daughter in the recent mythic hurricane-in-the-bayou film, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), but here, frankly, I found the depiction of the playoff between well-intended fatherly love and questionably responsible parenthood more accessible and believable.

This tale involves some cinematic magic which, in a former technological age, would have been all but impossible, and adds to the believability of the scenario. However, it is the hard-boiled and sternly existential gazes with which the two protagonists face their private demons, and then face one another, that provides the real fuel for this gritty and compelling tale.

– BADMan