One of the biggest box office hits of the year in France and a sensation at Cannes, Rust and Bone is the new film from the director of A Prophet, a powerful and emotionally raw love story starring Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose / The Dark Knight Rises) and acclaimed Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts. Broke drifter and back-street boxer Ali dreams of making it big in the martial arts while scrambling to make a living for himself and his young son. Taking work as a nightclub bouncer, he meets Stéphanie, who works as a killer-whale trainer at an amusement park, commanding the beasts with an ease absent from her relationships. After Stéphanie suffers a terrible accident, the unlikely pair fall into a tender, tentative courtship. ‘Jacques Audiard’s moving love story, which surges out of the screen like a flood tide, deserves to be awash with awards.’ (The Guardian)
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Jacques Audiard’s director’s statement about Rust and Bone:
‘There is something gripping about Craig Davidson’s short story collection “Rust and Bone”, a depiction of a dodgy, modern world in which individual lives and simple destinies are blown out of all proportion by drama and accident. They offer a vision of the United States as a rational universe in which the physical needs to fight to find its place and to escape what fate has in store for it.
‘Ali and Stephanie, our two characters, do not appear in the short stories, and Craig Davidson’s collection already seems to belong to the prehistory of the project, but the power and brutality of the tale, our desire to use drama, indeed melodrama, to magnify their characters all have their immediate source in those stories. ‘From the very beginning of our work adapting it, we were focused on a kind of cinematography that, for want of a better word, we called “expressionist”. We wanted the power of stark, brutal and contrasting images in order to further the melodrama: the aesthetics of the Great Depression, of countyfair films whose bizarre visual work sublimates the dark reality of a world in which God “vomits the lukewarm”.
‘It is that kind of aesthetic that constantly guided us as we worked on the screenplay. It sustains a love story that is the true hero of the film. It shows the world though the eyes of a confused child. It underscores the nobleness of our characters in a world made violent by economic disaster. And it respects Ali and Stéphanie’s stubborn attempts to escape their condition.’
