Rust and Bone

Last Man Standing
or
You Don't Know What You Got 'Til It's Gone 

Jacques Audiard's new film De Rouille et le D'os  (Rust and Bone, in English) is as far afield from his last film, The Prophet, as could be.  That film was a mini-Godfather, that showed the traps a criminal puts himself into, whether he's in prison or the King of the Hill.  

Rust and Bone, though, is a love story about the transitory nature of selfishness and the numbing vacuousness of complacency, which sounds like it'd be a a dull film, or a pedantic English theme.  Combine it, though, with kick-boxing and killer whales chewing your legs off, and it becomes a different animal altogether.

Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), unemployed father of Sam (Armand Vendure), crashes with his sister in Antibes, while he tries to get his act together.  He jogs, he works out at the gym, dreams of being a kick-boxer, but the best he can do is bounce at a night-club, where he meets Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), or rather rescues her, from an altercation.  She's a performer with a local Marineland park, directing killer whales through stunts and tricks, before a live audience.  Everything is going well during one performance when an accident happens and, as a result, Stéphanie loses both legs below the knees.  Submerged in depression, contemplating suicide, she calls Ali for help (it would be another of his string of odd jobs to earn money), where he starts to help her with therapy, specifically carrying her down to the wheelchair-inaccessible beach, so she can swim.

Ali is so deeply rooted in his own needs, that almost by osmosis, Stéphanie begins to care more about herself, and stops living in the past.  The sex helps.  But Ali is entirely self-absorbed and wants to keep things casual.  For further money, he starts participating in paid street-fight competitions, while Stéphanie takes the plunge and decides that she'll invest in artificial limbs and learn to walk again.

It's such a lop-sided story of co-dependency that it may seem like a frustrating film, but the performances of the two leads, Cotillard and Schoenaerts, go a long way in keeping interest.  Cotillard, in particular, seems to be oozing this performance out of some deep, dark place in her core (either that or she didn't sleep for a week) that is painful but fascinating to watch, while Schoenaerts is such a non-expressive performer, you might think that he is so completely internalized that he just walked off the street.  

And it's the performances that balance this film out, making the paths the actors take even necessary to sell the circumstances when the movie veers into melodrama, making an emotional course correction to get to an ending that...well, might have a point, even if a conventional one.

Meanwhile, Audiard does some impressive work with merely images, as the character of Ali is somewhat uncommunicative, and subtle shadows over people's faces suggest a shift in attitude between them.  And the whole Marineland sequences are like a sensory-overload nightmare—music constantly blaring, a robotic response-non-response from the performers to the audience, the pure, dumb folly of it all is quite an amazing sequence of textures and tones that provide a great deal of foreshadowing, even though you don't know what's coming—you just know that the place is on the knife-edge of panic and chaos.

So, an interesting film once it gets started, but then suffers a shift-tone that leads to some mighty convenient changes of heart, and makes Rust and Bone get all gooey inside, without (thank God) anthropomorphizing the whales.

Rust and Bone is a Matinee.

Un Prophète

"You Only Live Twice"

19 year old Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is arrested and put in prison for beating up a cop. Under-educated and street-dumb, he's easy prey in the French prison system. And Arab-Corsican, he's an outsider in a cell-block population made up of Corsican partisans and Muslim detainees—well, that's what they say, anyway. Malik can only be a "lone wolf" for so long, and soon the Corsicans bring them under their protection—for a price.

He has to "make his bones" first; he must kill a "just-passing-through" star witness in a racketeering trial against the Corsicans. Once accomplished, done in as grisly a fashion possible ("He's going to bleed a lot, so watch your shoes" is the advice), two things happen: he becomes "the porter" for the leader of the Corsicans, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup) and given certain privileges for his status—the guard system is friendly to the Corsicans; and his victim keeps showing up in his cell in spirit form, initially haunting him. Both connections are very useful in his education.

There's been a lot of mushy verbiage rasped about this film being a French
"Godfather," and there are some surface similarities. But "A Prophet" owes more to Kurosawa and Shakespeare (aren't the two related?) than to Coppola and Puzo. Sure, it's about a young man's education rising in the ranks of a blood organization, but there the similarities end.

Malik is not born into his "Family," coming from privilege—far from it. He's an outsider, and will stay an outsider (despite very loyal attachments) throughout the entire movie. He's a zephyr, moving between the Corsican and Muslim worlds, a part but apart, just as he becomes a citizen of both the prison and outside worlds once his good behavior buys him some time as a half-way. The connections he makes in prison are the important ones, and he soon finds himself, through a combination of luck, guile and networking the head of a cocaine smuggling ring—while still in prison.

Stylistically, the film is night and day from "The Godfather," despite that they both open in darkness. But where Coppola's style is formal and staged, director Jacques Audiard is up-close and hand-held, moving constantly and delving into the surreal with slow motion, and dream sequences (and the occasional pin-hole camera shot). Audiard is also adept at shooting violence, building tension, and then letting loose with gritty sequences that not only get the heart racing, but also make you worry about the protagonist—it's never easy to kill someone, despite what the movies say. There's one bizarre shot of Malik on the floor of a car in the middle of a fire-fight—a fire-fight inside the car, mind you—where he watches in slowest of motions as bullets hit the console around him, never touching him. But be that as it may, one should be mindful of the throat-slashings, the puncture wounds, kitchen utensils under the eyeballs, and the near-occasion of vehicular assault on deer. Not for the squeamish...or the vegan.

"A Prophet" is a nicely done modern take on the gangster story. But don't be surprised if you end up thinking it's the dark side of the Horatio Alger story. It won the "Grand Prix" at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

"A Prophet" is a Full-Price Ticket.