Posted: January 12, 2013 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Jacques Audiard, Marion Cotillard, Matthais Schoenarts, Rust and Bone, Thomas Bidegain | 3 Comments »
Rust and Bone is a meet cute story about a double amputee who has a romance with a mixed martial arts fighter and they change each other (I know, I know, it sounds like a logline for a high concept film that any devotee of Save the Cat would be salivating over—but believe me, it’s far too original and fresh to be mentioned in the same sentence as that book, which I guess I’ve already done—shoot).
I suppose one might describe it as the distaff version of The Intouchables, the movie about the privileged white quadriplegic who hires a minority to help him and they change each other. But perhaps it would be better to compare it to The Sessions, the comedy about the guy in the iron lung who wants to lose his virginity so he hires a sex surrogate and they change each other (are you sensing a leit motif here?). That might be a slightly better fit because, whereas The Intouchables is safe, cuddly and as formulaic as a teddy bear (and proved that the French are just as able to create middle brow entertainment as the Americans–The Help, anyone?), The Sessions uses its edgy and dark humor to hide a bitterness and anger at the way God has set up the world which, believe me, is much closer to the style and attitude of Rust and Bone.
Rust and Bone is written by Jacques Audiard (who also directed) and Thomas Bidegain (Craig Davidson wrote the story). Both are rising stars in France. Audiard is also known for The Beat that My Heart Skipped (the far superior remake of James Toback’s Fingers) and The Prophet (about the rise of a young Arab man from fresh prison meat to the head of organized crime—a remarkable film also co-written by Bidegain). Bidegain most recently co-wrote the movie Our Children which has the same actors as in A Prophet.
The leads in Rust and Bone are Stephanie, played by Marion (La Vie en Rose) Cotillard, as a trainer at an aquarium who loses her legs after a platform collapses and sends her into a tank of killer whales, and Alain, Matthais (Bullhead) Schoenarts, as the fighter who tends to work on instinct without fully understanding how his actions affect other people (so animal instinct is he, that when Cotillard mentions that she is not sure she is able to be sexually responsive, Schoenarts casually asks if she wants to “fuck” to see; he’s not being flirtatious, he’s not being coy; he’s flat out asking in as practical and everyday manner as one could; I suppose one should be repulsed, but instead, one is more often won over by his attitude than not). Cotillard brings those Bette Davis/Jeanne Moreau eyes of hers to the proceedings and one can’t help but melt when you see them. Schoenarts brings the same bullheadness he brought to Bullhead. They have a quite palpable chemistry between them. Whatever else you may think of the film, you can’t deny the intensity of their scenes together.
The, it has to be admitted, somewhat manipulative plot is one of those that tends to constantly change directions and take off on odd forks in the road, yet is never unbelievable or dramatically unsatisfying. It makes sense in all its chutes and ladders configurations. The story is basically a converging of two popular fairy tales. On one hand, we have Beauty and the Beast with Stephanie as the beauty who tames Alain’s beast and helps him realize that he can care for others and doesn’t have to act on his bestial nature. The other is The Little Mermaid in which a woman gains her legs because of her love for a prince. I’m not sure that either one of them have quite been told the way they have here, but in the end, the story reaches an emotional depth that’s not easy to shake off.
What Audiard and Bidegain do here is bring a beauty to all the ugliness that is taking place. No matter how unpleasant the world of Stephanie and Alain gets, the filmmakers reveal that underneath it all there’s something more going on. This is a story about two people who have had awful things happen to them or even do awful things, but both have souls that defy the situation. This is a world that is a challenge to exist in, that is not often sympathetic to those who live in it, yet people can come together and create something more from it. It’s not always an easy film to watch, but it is a moving and rewarding one.
For more reviews, check out my blog at http://howardcasner.blogspot.com
Posted: November 7, 2012 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Barbara movie, Berberian Sou, Berberian Sound Studio, Christian Petzold, Emilie Dequenne, Joachim LaFosse, Mattieu Reynaert, Niels Arestrup, Nina Hoss, Our Children, Tahir Rahim, Thomas Bidegain | 6 Comments »
In the wonderful gangster film A Prophet, Niels Arestrup and Tahir Rahim played ersatz father and son. In the Belgium film Our Children, the two are together again to play…ersatz father and son. All right. It may not have the same ring to it of Hepburn and Tracy, but the two are wonderful together and perhaps the main reason to see this domestic drama that, like Berberian…, starts out very intriguingly, but soon enough stops going anywhere and stagnates about half way through.
The movie is really more about Murielle (played by Emilie Dequenne, the wonderful actress of The Girl on the Train and Rosetta), who marries Mounir (Rahim). Mounir is Moroccan and was adopted by Andre (Arestrup) after Andre married Mounir’s older sister so she could get her papers. However, Mounir is not marrying Murielle for citizenship; he truly does love her.
But this is where things start taking an odd turn as it slowly becomes clear that, also like Berberian…, something is off here. First, Mounir asks Andre to come on their honeymoon. At the wedding, Mounir’s younger brother suggests something’s going on between Mounir and Andre. Murielle and Mounir live in Andre’s spacious apartment/doctor’s office and Andre pays all the bills while Mounir works as his receptionist. When Murielle suggests that she and Mounir move to Morocco where the standard of living is cheaper, Andre says that if Mounir does, he will never have anything to do with him again.
But what exactly is going on behind all this in your face subtext? One keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never does. So was there something really going on or are the writers (Thomas Bidegain, Joachim Lafosse, and Mattieu Reynaert) and the director (Lafosse again) just misleading us for some reason? Well, Lafosse only knows and he ain’t telling. And Murielle does the same thing, or actually doesn’t do the same thing, as Gilderoy in Berberian…: she never asks. She never asks what most people would ask somewhere along the way: just why is Andre so generous and paying for everything and just what is he getting out of this odd situation?
As the story goes on and Murielle has four children, she becomes increasingly stressed out and depressed. And then she does the unthinkable. But why? I really couldn’t tell you except that she was depressed, but I’m sorry, I just didn’t buy it. And though I did empathize with Murielle and her situation, it’s almost impossible to pull off a Medea. But at least Media had a clear and understandable motive—revenge. Murielle reasons seem a bit too vague and confusing. So, for me, it doesn’t really have the emotional impact the movie is aiming for.
Though I think Arestrop and Rahim give the best performances, it’s Dequenne who won at Cannes (in the Un Certain Regard section). And maybe they’re right in a way. Murielle’s character made no real sense to me and I felt there was no character for her to play, but in spite of this, she does succeed in giving a first rate performance—from my perspective a triumph of talent over substance.
Finally, Barbara is Christian (Yella and Jerichow) Petzold’s new directorial effort. It stars his usual leading lady, Nina Hoss, both of whom are becoming two of Germany’s most exciting emerging talents.
The story takes place in 1980 East Germany, still under Communist rule. Barbara is a doctor who has just been released from prison for some unspecified crime against the state. She is sent to a small town where she is to perform her duties at a local hospital while being heavily watched by the authorities. At the same time, she is planning to escape the country with the help of her West German lover, that is until her plans are complicated by her becoming emotionally involved in some local issues at her place of employment (don’t you hate when that happens?).
Barbara is quite effective in the first half. There is a wonderful feel of time and place, the very atmosphere tinged with a feeling of despair and sadness best symbolized by her riding a bike past a lonely cross in the middle of nowhere while the strong wind bellows around her; even when she’s in open country and can see for miles, she’s still afraid that somehow, some way, someone is watching her. The details of everyday life in East Germany are convincingly dramatized (having to be careful what you say and where you say it because you don’t know who will report you and who won’t). And there are deeply moving scenes of a young pregnant woman being forced into a work camp (called a death camp by Barbara) and the unclear diagnosis of young man who has tried to commit suicide.
Foss is excellent in the title roll, a character who has to be very careful about sharing her emotions. As an actress, she has some of the same qualities of Greta Garbo, a haunting beauty who was also very reserved in her emotions so that when she laughed, as Barbara does occasionally, it lights up the scene. But the writers, Harun Farocki and Petzold, do her a bit of a disservice. As the movie goes on, it tends to lose its way mainly because Barabara is given two competing motivations for her actions, while also not given enough time or the structure to develop either one for their maximum emotional impact. Instead, the closer one gets to the end, the more muddled everything becomes until the plot loses all forward momentum and the ending feels a bit too anticlimactic.
