Where the screenplay’s believability breaks down is the brutish character of Ali, and particularly, what Stéphanie sees in a guy who seems to be suffering from testosterone poisoning. It’s not Schoenaerts’ fault, but Ali comes across as so crudely unlikable, so narcissistic, abusive and devoid of empathy for others, that it’s a lot tougher to swallow Stéphanie’s willingness to trust him to help her than it is to accept her missing limbs. Presumably, we are meant to deduce that Ali’s animality being so close to the surface enables her to reclaim her own, the same way in which her “tamed” orca reverted so suddenly to its wild nature. When Ali begins taking her with him to the gory amateur Mixed Martial Arts matches where he’s making some money on the side, Stéphanie reacts with an odd mix of admiration and revulsion, as if the two sides of her own nature are at war.
At first it’s Ali who prods her to get out and about after her accident, but Stéphanie actually makes her biggest breakthroughs when she is not with him: discovering that she can still enjoy swimming after he has walked away from her at the beach; flirting with someone else after Ali has abandoned her at her favorite disco; reconnecting with both her former co-workers and, in the movie’s most moving sequence, with the whales at Marineland. In a crucial scene where she works up the nerve to demand more than just a casual friends-with-benefits relationship, Stéphanie tells Ali point-blank that they can’t go on “like animals.” Ali needs to change, as she has.
It’s at this point, alas, that the movie seems to run out of ideas. The motivation for Ali both to get his act together as a responsible father and to realize that he truly loves Stéphanie is wrung out of a plot turn that seems melodramatic and contrived. Dense and self-absorbed as the character may be, surely a more subtle and gradual growth arc would not have been too much to ask from what is otherwise a very worthy cinematic effort. The ending seems pat instead of satisfying.
But for all its shortcomings, Rust and Bone is a film worth seeing, a decidedly unromantic romance. The cinematography is unslick but artful, the score by Alexandre Desplat admirably spare – indeed, many of the most absorbing scenes have no music track at all. With the exception of a few bits in which Schoenaerts expresses his frustration by literally banging his head against things, the acting seems natural and unaffected. But the primary reason to go remains Cotillard’s performance, as she shows us with absolute conviction that losing one’s legs doesn’t mean that one cannot grow wings.
Rust and Bone, rated R, two hours long, directed by Jacques Audiard; based on the short-story collection “Rust and Bone” by Craig Davidson; starring Marion Cotillard & Matthias Schoenaerts.
