Rust And Bone Preview

If I were awarding my own top prize for best film at Cannes 2012, it would go to Jacques Audiard’s Rust And Bone. A romance between a killer whale trainer and a bare knuckle boxer may not sound like a recipe for cinematic brilliance but I found Rust And Bone’s rough edges and raw emotion a good deal more affecting than clinical precision of the Palme d’Or winning Amour.

Marion Cotillard plays Stéphanie, a trainer of Orcas at Marineworld on the Cote d’Azur. After a tragic accident at work(which I won’t reveal here), Stéphanie strikes up a friendship with the brutish but charming boxer, Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts).  His charismatic insouciance is a good fit for Stephanie’s predicament and as they spend more and more time together, their relationship develops into something more serious.

This coincides with Alain embarking on a number of bare knuckle bouts with local gypsys, which Stephanie begins to attend. Structurally the film is a bit all over the place but the performances from Cotillard and Schoenaerts are of the highest calibre (a theme of this Cannes), in two rather unsympathetic roles. Schoenaerts in particular, previously a relative unknown, is surely destined for worldwide success as he’s a huge presence in every sense.

I’m also a sucker for a good scene set to pop music and Rust And Bone has a number of them, with one particular scene set to Katy Perry’s Fireworks an emotional stand-out. The film sharply brought into focus what presses my buttons when I go to see a film and I couldn’t argue with anyone who found the film too melodramatic or lacking in originality but the raw emotion of the story and performances hit me hard and of all the films I saw at Cannes 2012, this is the one I have thought about most since.

Rust And Bone is released on November 2^nd.

[embed width=550]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRQyuzcg_Pk[/embed]