Rust and Bone

+Rust and Bone -- 2011, Dir. Jacques +Audriard

More precisely, the original French title is Of rust and bone. The subject is the difference between the vulnerability of metal and the vulnerability of humanity. Two things distinguish the human: the capacity to feel and a moral center. In the film two cripples recover by developing both.

Though the woman has the more dramatic story, the film opens on the man, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), who will grow from randomly decent brute to a feeling, whole man. He’s trying to make a life with his five-year-old son (the mother busted for using the kid to smuggle drugs). Ali has good instincts -- caring for his son, sensitive to a young woman’s needs -- but his goodness is intermittent, not centered. When he’s focused on a TV fight he is first negligent, then violent toward his son. Ali takes a job installing hidden cameras  without considering the danger to the workers, especially his sister, who has been putting up him and his son. Ali’s jobs are physical: bouncer, night watchman, management spy technician, then alley brawler. He doesn’t think about the consequences of his actions. 

When his sister loses her job Ali finally acknowledges his responsibility. In a kind of civilizing he leaves the alley brawls to train for a professional career in kick boxing. Going off alone to train is his cleansing purgatory, which climaxes in his visiting son’s accident. To break through the ice to save him, Ali breaks the bones in his right fist, which will painfully impede but not preclude his kick boxing career. His son’s near death releases Ali’s capacity for love, first for his son, then for Stephanie (Marion Cotillard). At that point the man who has suffered so much physical pain can finally cry. Before, he was the man of steel -- unfeeling, cold, hard. Twice his son complains his father’s hands are cold; he breaks the ice to save him. That makes Ali fully human, the man of bone, wounded but feeling. 

At first Stephanie performs as a whale trainer and gets her jollies by dancing provocatively at a disco. Both show her exhibitionism and her pretense to control the forces of wild nature, the whales and the turned-on men. But her power is illusory. She’s controlled by her live-in boyfriend Simon and assaulted at the disco. Nor does she really control the wild nature of the whale, just signals its rote routine. When a whale crashes the wall she loses both legs. As an augur of her doom our first shots of her are of her lovely legs. Like the brutish strong Ali, Stephanie’s strength is also her point of vulnerability. 

Ali’s generous reflex leads him to become her intermittent caregiver. He takes her from her putrefying seclusion into the outdoors, climaxing in her return to the water, swimming. Both crises occur in the water -- Stephanie’s at the marina, the boy’s under the ice -- which is the archetypal origin of life. The underwater shots suggest an amniotic rebirth. Both characters’ redemption begins in the water, when Ali carries Stephanie to the beach and launches her swim. In that act she recovers her will to live and he confirms his virtuous reflex. But it’s still just a reflex, not a firm moral sense. So though he serves her, he can still neglect her and even humiliate her. His abandoning her at the disco is a dramatic contrast to his generous care at their first meeting. Alain’s intermittent humanity rusts without a solid moral core and the willingness to love.