Film Review: De Rouille et d'Os

Rust and Bone is one of these movies you know you will love even before watching it and love it all the more afterwards because it has not disappointed your expectations.

De Rouille et d'Os (2012) | France | 120 mins | Jacques Audiard

About délicatesse

“Tu sais très bien ce que c’est, t’as pas arrêté d’en avoir avec moi de la délicatesse”

I have seen the trailer a while ago and I was already convinced by the rightness of its tone. A beautiful yet rough-looking girl with no legs (Marion Cotillard) reproaches a tall big guy (Matthias Schoenaerts) for not showing enough sensitivity although she says he knows very well what it is like to handle her with tact.
Well, to me, Rust and Bone manages exactly what its main protagonist struggles to do all through the 2-hour-long feature - to deal with an extremely delicate situation with beautiful tact, to carry along his brutality and force without hurting too much, punching his violence away with unexpected grace.

I - I follow, I follow you - Deep sea baby
Like in Un Prophète ou De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté, Jacques Audiard here again delivers a heavy-hearted movie with virtuose sensitivity, avoiding all kind pathos or victimisation of its characters. These are normal people, small people, hard working in anonymity. But they are not victims, they fight and fall, they fail and try again to make it better. It is their humanity that makes their stories worth telling. These could as well be true ones; they would not even seem as real. She, a provincial chick who loses her legs in a tragic accident, meets him, a poor guy arrived from Belgium to his sister’s in Antibes with all but a 5 year-old son and misused boxing skills to make a living. Beyond the drama that casts deep shadows in the heart of ordinary lives, the strength of the film is to keep the ‘extraordinary’ within the realm of a sober and powerful narrative. Efficient like a summer disco hit.

The (good) taste of Rust and Bone
Presenting his work at the Berlin Premiere during the French Film week, the French director explained the genesis of his opus as being an adaptation of two short stories written by Craig Davidson, a Canadian author whose first collection also gave its name to the film. With a certain sense of humour, Audiard told his amused audience how screenwriters could sublimate this raw mix with a love affair and had him make a successful film out of it. The truth is that Audiard is a master in filming stories where love is the hardest thing to say. With Rust and Bone, he once again provides us with a touching and sensual cinematographic piece loaded with bashful emotional content. A MUST SEE.

Moviepilot colleagues at Berlin Premiere at beautiful Kino International