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ORIGINAL: R W

Adapted from the short-story collection by Canadian author Craig Davidson, French director Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to his crime epic masterpiece A Prophet is not one of darkness and corruption as you would expect from Monsieur Audiard, as he goes for something softer and more romantic. Broke and homeless, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) takes his five year-old son Sam to the south of France to move in with his sister. During his various positions, Ali gets acquainted with a killer whale trainer, Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) and together, their lives change.

If Rust and Bone has any familiarity with Audiard’s back catalogue, it would perhaps be with his 2001 love story Read My Lips which delved into fear and revenge, and again about crime. However, this is simply about humanity through the eyes of two very distinctive people, which are a conflicted brute struggling to be a good family man and a successful killer whale trainer whose life takes a wrong turn. Despite coming from two different worlds, their initial encounter is the start of something beautiful.

Marion Cotillard is extraordinary is the female lead, as she is introduced in a very trashy matter and later realising what an accomplishment she is. When she becomes the victim of a major accident, the sequence where she wakes up in a hospital bed, her screaming in fear is truly earth-shattering. As for her co-star, Matthias Schoenaerts is great as someone who is trying to do good for his son Sam, but he is constantly making the wrong decisions, from aggressively controlling Sam to having sex with numerous women despite his close bond with Stéphanie.

With a level of melodrama to the story, if Rust and Bone was to be Americanised, it would have been mushy and fit more into the realms of Lifetime: television for idiots. Given there are some flaws within the film like the ending and the inclusion of Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, Audiard presents a beautiful depiction of a rather unusual relationship, showing the grit and beauty of numerous sequences (special praise to cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, from the bare-knuckle fights to the simple image of Stéphanie raising her hand as she is being reacquainted with one of the whales.

Not up there with The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet, Jacques Audiard’s latest is a touching, unconventional love story that manages to be avoid succumbing to the melodramatic elements, while Marion Cotillard is a revelation.

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ORIGINAL: GCH

An amazing film and an intriguing story. Thank God this was not the Hollywood version! The special effects are sensational- did Marion have her legs amputated for the part? How do they make it look so realistic? I also think this was a five star film, as I found it totally absorbing and moving. At one point in the film, there was a loud gasp from the audience- I can't recall that sort of thing from other films- which showed that everyone else was also deeply immersed in the story.
Wow!