Rust and Bone (MA). Director: Jacques Audiard. Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts. 122 minutes
The past year has seen the arrival of a number of excellent films that deal with the realities of physical infirmity. Films such as The Sessions, Amour and The Intouchables feature able-bodied actors portraying characters who experience disability due to genetics, age and accident respectively. They are remarkable for their central performances but also for their exploration of the imperfect human responses of the other people in their lives.
Rust and Bone belongs to this list but is the most difficult to categorise. It divides its time between Stéphanie (Cottillard), a whale trainer from a theme park who loses her legs in a workplace accident, and Alain (Schoenaerts), a single father and fighter who becomes her confidante. His story is as prominent as hers, if not more so. The contrast between them makes for an optimistic but not mawkish reflection on flawed humanity.
When Alain first encounters Stéphanie she is able bodied. She suffers a physical assault at a nightclub where he works as a security guard, and he intervenes to rescue her. He is tall and powerful, and having thus played the chivalrous knight his physicality is from the outset central to their interactions. It can be used to threaten too: he sees Stéphanie to her home, where he proceeds to intimidate her boyfriend when he questions his presence.
Stéphanie is also physical, though in a way that is surreal rather than brutish. Prior to her accident, there is a scene where she joins colleagues on a platform before the whale pool and 'conducts' the massive beasts to perform for an audience. Her graceful hand gestures seem to control each twirl and leap. There is an element of illusion to this, as the circumstances of the accident prove. Each of us shapes but is also shaped by our environment.
The film follows Stéphanie from the accident and its outcome through her early, draining rehabilitation. Alain re-enters her life some time later at her invitation, and arrives to find her now living alone, wheelchair bound and with her previous vibrancy curtailed by depression. He coaxes her out of her home and into the sea to swim. She begins to come out of her slump. As their friendship intensifies, she revives. They begin a sexual relationship.
Alain is a complex character, often well meaning but insensitive. On the one hand his affair with Stéphanie is