Point Form Review: "Rust and Bone"

Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)

Most attention has been given to Marion Cotillard's magnificent performance, and for good reason: it's quite the feat of acting. But much has also been written about its meandering narrative, and usually in the negative -- which I must disagree with. Here are my quickly typed out notes immediately after the film, with some expansion.

-Chilly realism, beautifully shot: highlights include the movements of humans, water and whales in the bravura MarineLand sequence; sunlight dappling off of the reflective surface of water and through trees above; the multitude of shots of the body in action.

-Audiard is not so much interested in telling tightly scripted narratives as he is in a pseudo-realist mode of the quiet moments of everyday life interspersed with crunching violence; while it may seem stretched out for some audiences, those that are game will find beauty and depth. The film is unsentimentally understanding of its broken characters, and manages to find romance even as it avoids, and even shuns, romanticism.

-Audiard's cinema is a physical one, something we also experienced with the brutality of Un prophète. Here, we find a film preoccupied with physical exertion: blood, skin, sensation, sights and sounds, muscle and bones crunching, bloodied surfaces of snow, ice and glass, bubbling bloody spit, bloody water, broken skin from punches and thrown champagne glasses, a tooth falling to the ground. It is a film that attempts to capture the desire to feel, touch, dance and move: swimming, boxing, fucking. We simultaneously see the commodification of the body in contemporary France, as security cameras capture forbidden movements and actions of employees, whose menial jobs in chain stores are utterly without meaningful physical sensation or even exertion, or as with Stephanie's career as a marine animal trainer, the choreography of bodies (both animal and human) becomes a tacky spectacle set to Katy Perry. Ali, when he first meets Stephanie at the dance club the Annex, says that she dresses like a whore and doesn't quite understand her desire to simply go to the bar and dance. But Ali is generally indifferent to the gravity of his physicality: sex is the fleeting pleasure of one night stands, fighting a cheap way to spend excess energy and get quick money.



-I disliked the choices of music, but am unsure whether or not the selection of bland pop and boring, misty-eyed indie twee was a conscious decision or not.

-Matthias Schoenaerts' performance has been unfairly ignored, shadowed by the behemoth of Cotillard's international celebrity. His Ali is a complex mixture of goofy man-child sympathy and near-antagonistic imperfections, a bubbling concoction of masculine violence and attempts at fatherly responsibility. Audiard doesn't try to make his lead character likeable in any conventional sense, as Ali stumbles in his journey. Like most men, he makes mistakes, finds his temper flare and lets his immediate desires occasionally take over: but Cotillard's Stephanie isn't the magical saviour of grace and angelic perfection that most narratives would have her be, either. She struggles with depression and has her own flares of anger -- but nevertheless is a strong woman. Their chemistry is undeniable even as it's imperfect, and the scenes of Ali carrying Stephanie to and from the sea are some of the most beautiful and rousing images captured on camera in 2012.

Point Form Review: Anna Karenina (2012)

Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012)

-most notable is the stunning production design: the film's diegesis is a strange, wonderful mixture of a theatrical stage with ever-morphing and sometimes impossible set changes, along with the Russian wilderness behind -- space and time are splintered, mimicking the burgeoning changes of modernity
-the artifice of the theatre mimics social performance, a most pressing notion in Tolstoy's novel
-bitingly ironic, almost cruel in its tragedy; the tragedy that is love, sin, desire
-the first hour features incredible editing and a wickedly flamboyant pace
-sets up a nature vs. theatre dynamic: Anna is associated mostly with the interior, with escapes to the outside world where she is surrounded by a peaceful, loving nature; whats-his-face finds finds solace in the fields, but is constantly drawn to the chaos of the urban. The decision we face is whether we abandon (modern) society for a doomed utopia (a rural world that is being eaten up, being oppressed, and potentially excruciatingly lonely), or whether we brave the simultaneously judgemental and aloof gazes of a modern, urban, capitalist Society with its unwritten but strict "rules".
-the cruelty of a distant God: we are but puppets on a string, but the string is constantly breaking and shifting and our stage is fracturing
-love is both destructive and healing; will God punish those that give into love? Or does it depend on what kind of love?
-incredible score: an old-fashioned romantic violin motif runs throughout, like a classical Hollywood melodrama: in fact, much of the film seems to be in the vein of a Sirkian irony, where all the sumptuous design, colours, costumes and complicated dynamics of the plot become 'too much' and unstable -- revealing its biting, almost cruel, vision of romance. Is this style over substance, as many critics have charged? I don't think so, because it seems to me that the hyperbolic style enhances Tolstoy's underpinnings. I love a good straight-forward costume drama, too --take The Last Station-- but we've already seen these kind of adaptations of Anna Karenina before.
-Wright and screenwriter Stoppard have taken some big chances here. They don't always work, but I love when filmmakers attempt the gutsy.