Rust And Bone

Many of the torments facing Matthias Schoenaerts in Rust And Bone are strikingly similar to those in Schoenaerts’ breakthrough role in Bullhead as a ’roided-up henchman in the black-market cattle-hormone trade. Schoenaerts and his 5-year-old son have hitchhiked their way to live with his working-class sister (Celine Sallette) while he gets his act together. He picks up a few odd jobs, but he’s a brawler by build and by nature, and it eventually lands him a position as a nightclub bouncer. One night he saves Marion Cotillard, a Marineworld trainer, from a melee at the club and drives her home, where he’s again called upon to protect her, this time from a jealous, violent boyfriend. The two part amicably, but Cotillard comes back into Schoenaerts’ life after the accident robs her of both legs and wounds her in less visible ways, too.

Based on Craig Davidson’s short-story collection, Rust And Bone is a deft, sidewinding drama about two people overcoming disabilities in body and soul. There’s something deeply romantic about the ways each of them try, consciously or not, to rehabilitate the other, and great complexity, too, in the schism that develops when one comes closer to being whole than the other. Cotillard and Schoenaerts have a raw chemistry that’s unquantifiable yet totally convincing, even though her character seems like the last person to accompany a Neanderthal like him to an underground street-fighting match. The film stumbles a little with a deus ex machina ending that hastily attempts to glue the fractured bits of narrative back together, but Audiard’s conviction strengthens the seal. In his hands, something as simple as a dip in the ocean becomes a vivid, sunkissed, restorative paradise.