Rust and Bone

Overview

What helps a formerly active person who has lost both their legs find the will to keep on living? It's rarely a guy like Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), who fights in illegal bouts, hits his kid, kicks dogs, disrespects women, does dodgy things for cash and is all-round one of the least likeable characters to ever appear on screen. And yet the journey Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) goes on through him makes just enough sense to be believable — powerful, actually — in Jacques Audiard's feature film Rust and Bone.

Stephanie is an orca trainer at a Cote d'Azur equivalent of Sea World. One day, to the poetically dissonant backing of Katy Perry's 'Firework', a public performance goes wrong and Stephanie wakes in hospital to find her legs amputated. After weeks of depression, she calls Ali, a nightclub bouncer she met briefly before the accident and thought little of at the time. His company turns out to be relaxed and matter of fact; he does not handle her with kid gloves, and it's just what she needs to begin to figure out her new sense of self. When he starts out on his underground boxing career, she finds herself unexpectedly drawn in.

The film is quite a big departure from the source material, Canadian writer Craig Davidson's collection of short stories by the same name. The book is filled with disparate men dealing with masculinity, corporeality and violence (an adaptation at Sydney's Griffin Theatre earlier this year adhered more closely to the original). In condensing the eight short stories to two lives, Audiard's Rust and Bone seems even more brutal, if that's possible, and the drawing of explicit intersections and connections between characters turns out to be satisfyingly meaningful.

The most visible and effective change is gender: Cotillard's Stephanie was originally a womanising dude. As such this Rust and Bone is no longer about men and their relationship with their bodies but humans and their relationship with their bodies — relationships that are in some ways different and in others the same. Audiard says something altogether new and intriguing with Stephanie, who previously enjoyed the power she held over men through her sexuality and appearance. She'll eventually find there's a new, untapped power over men she can exert, and it has nothing to do with prettiness.

Rust and Bone is an unsentimentally lyrical triumph, unexpected in every way from its narrative to its mise en scene. Cotillard is a sensation. Need it be said? This film about fighters packs a punch.