“Rust and Bone” (“De rouille et d’os”), the new character
drama by Jacques Audiard (Sony Pictures Classics), presents a two-sided
morality play, with two tragedies, and character and moral developments that
turn on their flip sides. This is a big
film, the largest from Sony this season besides “Zero”.
Matthias Schoenaerts plays Alain van Versch, a laborer and
drifter who comes from Belgium to Antibes (on the French Mediterranean coast)
with a five year old son left from a breakup, where his sister Anna (Corinne
Masiero) can help take care of the little boy.
“Ali” is the same kind of person that Matthias had played in “Bullhead”
[July 22], He engages other people, and
can take care of them, but does so tactically, and impulsively. He’s like a chess player offering unsound
sacrifices or gambits for attacking chances.
“Positional play” and personal optimization in his life means nothing. You can see that in the "fight club" and boxing scenes.
In a disco where he works as a bouncer, he meets Stephanie
(Marion Cottilard), who trains and performs with orcsas (Killer whales) at a
water park. I hope this isn’t too much
of a spoiler, but most viewers probably know that about 40 minutes into the
two-hour film, Stephanie encounters disaster.
It appears (though it’s hard to see) that the orca attacks her. She wakes up in a hospital having lost both
legs.
A good part of the film is about their relationship. There is a scene where he teaches her to swim
again. He seems to gain as much from her
as she does from him. I don’t know how
the filmmakers simulated the stumps, but we see the physical details a
lot. Eventually, she gets prostheses and
can walk with crutches. I recall back in
January 1998, after my own hip fracture, while spending a week in rehab in a
Minneapolis SNF (associated with the University of Minnesota Fairview
Riverside), watching a man take his first steps on prosthetics, with the
Mississippi River view in the background.
The relationship becomes passionate, which is out of my own
league temperamentally. It’s always been
important to me that I be able to imagine a potential partner as “perfect”. Sorry, I would have seen this accident as
disfiguring, and would have felt cut off from any possibility of sexual feeling
at all.
This sort of territory has been visited before, in the 1996
film by David Cronenberg, “Crash” (the earlier film by that name) with James
Spader, from Fine Line. That injury or
damage provides fetishism is quite shocking to me. I don’t like to see men go downhill. (The gay magazine “Christopher Street” had an
article about this issue back in 1985 regarding Ronald Reagan as an actor and
the film “John Loves Mary”, saying that the film had “proved the existence of
heterosexuality”. So does this new
film.)
The film doesn’t dawdle on the problem of keeping dolphins
and orcas in captivity. The viewer can
try “Free Willy” (1993, Warner Brothers, directed by Simon Wincer) for that
issue. The orca may be the most intelligent animal after man, equal to the
chimpanzee. This provides a good example
of convergent evolution.
“Rust and Bone” turns us to its flip side (as if the film
were one figurative Mobius strip) with the rest of Ali’s work life. He takes a
gig as an undercover private investigator videotaping retail workers secretly
(doing stuff like taking long breaks, eating the food, smoking) so that the
company, over union contracts, can fire them.
Now, it so happens (conveniently) that Anna works in one of these
stores. One of Anna’s coworkers catches
Ali setting up cameras just before she is called in to “management” herself to
be fired. Anna also gets fired. The coworker comes over to the house and
chews out Ali for taking an “anti-worker” job like this and playing in cahoots
with management. Out of everyone’s
leftist indignation (and at the threat of a rifle), Ali flees for a ski
resort. Anna sends the little boy up
with him (he had left the boy behind, out of fear for his life). That sets up another accident on an icy pond
that will test Ali once more.
I saw the film at the Angelika Film Center in Merrifield VA
before an ample Saturday night crowd in an large auditorium. The film is shot full wide screen, 2.35:1.
The official site from Sony is here.
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