“Rust and Bone”
Cuts to the Bone
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades
Often I watch films with people who
relate to the subject matter up there on the screen. For instance, I watched
Jacques Audiard’s grim film “A Prophet” with a Syrian family. Riveting
and realistic, but unflinching in its tale of a young Arab man rising to power
in a French prison.
We agreed Audiard was a powerful
filmmaker to watch.
So why should I be surprised that
Audiard’s latest -- “Rust and Bone,” now playing at the Tropic -- would be just
as bleak?
One moviegoer, exhausted by the two-hour
emotional marathon, described it as “a love story without romance.”
Yes, this is an awkward entanglement
between a taciturn single father and a woman who trains killer whales at
Marineland. But despite the lengthy sex scenes, it is a painful-to-watch story.
Academy Award-winner Marion Cotillard
portrays Stephanie, the woman who loves orcas too much.
Matthias
Schoenaerts exudes a hulking macho as Ali, the Belgian club bouncer who begins a relationship with
the strong-willed Stephanie.
The film
pivots around a dreadful accident, told with a sense of foreboding, one that
prevents Stephanie from training the killer whales … so she
decides to train the primitive beast in her bed -- Ali.
“If we continue, we have to do it right
— not like animals,” she tells him. But his callous disregard for her and her
affliction makes this a difficult goal.
Set in the French Riviera, the
cinematography is amazing when the camera isn’t focusing on its two pathetic subjects.
Jacques Audiard gives us a vague happy
ending, but be he makes us (and his actors) work for it. You’ll be drained by
movie’s end.
Marion Cotillard was nominated for a
Golden Globe for this sensitive performance, but (surprisingly) failed to get
an Oscar nod.
I think I’ll take my niece who used to
work at Sea World to see “Rust and Bone.” A lesson to be learned about those
huge killer whales that she loves so much, and the guys who drift in and out of
her life.
srhoades@aol
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