Film review: Rust and Bone (3 out of 5 stars)

Rust and Bone.

Published on 06/11/2012 11:22

Marion Cottillard is one of those actresses who seems incapable of putting in a poor performance.

Give her a small role in Inception and she excels, stick her in a poor movie such as Contagion as she still manages to stand out.

There are early shouts for her to win some awards for this latest role, with plenty of reason.

It’s a difficult part to play for a variety of reasons, emotional and physical, but she sails through.

Cottillard is Stephanie, an orca whale trainer, whose life outside work is pretty dull with little direction.

At an Antibes nightclub she meets Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts), a bouncer who is also struggling to find a purpose in life.

He has recently travelled to the area, jobless, with no money and with his young son in tow.

He has moved in with his sister who is also struggling to make ends meet.

A few months later when the pair meet again it’s under very different circumstances.

Stephanie has had a tragic accident at work and has shut herself away from the world.

Alain is trying to earn money by taking part in organised but illegal street fights.

Slowly the two attempt to piece together a life that has some meaning, although the path ahead is far from smooth.

I have to say that while I enjoyed the movie for the most part, there were elements that I struggled with.

We don’t really see enough of Stephanie before her accident to understand her character and Alain is far from someone we can relate to.

I did enjoy director (and co-writer) Jacques Audiard’s work, with some amazing scenes (particularly the reuniting of Stephanie and the orca).

The CGI for Cottillard after her accident is also amazing - there seems to be nothing that modern film-makers can’t recreate.

Overall, it’s all quite gritty (no vivid colours), showing how life is a struggle for many people, with several hurdles that have to be overcome to find happiness and love.

Movie details:

Rust and Bone (15) 123mins.

Director: Jacques Audiard.

Starring: Marion Cottillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Corinne Masiero.

Steve Payne

Screening courtesy of Cineworld Crawley

Lifestyle

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Film review: Rust and Bone (3 out of 5 stars)

Top stories

Lifestyle