REVIEW - RUST AND BONE

An assured story of the lives and mental states of two damaged people, and how these components of their respective existences bleed into one another. The emotional content is driven by the narrative content, and vice versa, which gives the film a lulling rhythm structurally, although its vaguely episodic nature (due to its origins as a series of short stories) stymies the creation of a through-line either emotionally or narratively. We keep waiting for something significant to occur, while director Jacques Audiard keeps diverting, introducing extraneous elements of little consequence. He leaves little room for psychological development with his leads - it's occasionally an intense experience, exploring the minds of such injured souls, but we never get far enough in. Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard seem to understand their roles better than we are allowed to; glimpses of the depth of said understanding prove thrilling, but the finer details in the quieter moments are not sufficiently dwelt upon. I wished for a stronger storyline for Cotillard's Steph - she loses her legs in an accident, meets a man, recovers, that's mostly all - but gradually grew to appreciate Schoenaerts' thread more than at first. But drama turns abruptly into melodrama, which is directly effective but a little thin and unnecessary (like much of this film), and the ending lightly brushes away any dramatic weight built by the preceding two hours (at least 15 minutes too long, by the way). Still, there are some impressive, if formulaic, sections, and the more sensual of those are among the film's most effective; throughout, Schoenaerts and Cotillard's physical performances match their emotional performances, and correspond with them perfectly.