Critics reviews

Audiard said that as he approached this material, he realized that neither character was the protagonist: "The protagonist of the story is the love story. The love story is the hero." He is so successful at bringing that across that Rust and Bone has one of the most meaningful – if not the most meaningful (off the top of my head I can't think of another one) – "I love you"s in any movie I have ever seen. When I saw it in the theatre, and heard those words, I actually burst into tears.

In [Audiard's] latest, the director infuses a mockable melodrama with pungent physicality and demonstrates the restorative properties of sex and violence for a couple drawn to each other by mutual need.

Larded with so many silly setups, Rust and Bone is populated with characters who can never break out of molds; they exist only to push the unwieldy story along.

Audiard and his cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine set the film in a world of expansive visual possibility, granting absolute primacy to the poetic force of the image. Subplots outline a social commentary parallel to the love story, but those feel less necessary than the emphasis on single stirring scenes.

The air of surface refinement allows Jacques Audiard to more subtly press our buttons, masking the coarseness of his material while nudging up the emotional amplitude.

Cotillard delivers what is by far her finest, rawest performance to date. Immobile, physically and mentally, she reaches out to Alain; he treats her like a human being, without a trace of pity, and they begin to form a complicated, increasingly tight bond. While neatly avoiding melodrama, Rust and Bone is Jacques most emotionally engaging work yet. It's a film for people who believe that fallen souls aren't inevitably destined to become lost ones.

Whereas Audiard's prize-laden Un prophète (2009) was an unsatisfying prison film pastiche, his latest is a bombastic reinvention of the melodramatic imagination. The last thing we need is the sort of Frankenstein monster that results when a sloppy emulation of the Dardennes is crossed with sexed-up versions of the hoariest plot twists in film history.

The actors are more than up to the challenge, particularly the commanding Schoenaerts, last seen as the violent cattle farmer in the Oscar-nominated Bullhead. He and Cotillard are intensely physical presences, too, exuding the sense of two people who must constantly test their own physical limits in order to feel truly alive—in the water, in the ring, and in the bedroom.

It does turn out to be the schematic, conventional story of a horribly disabled person who gradually learns how to live again. That the disabled person isn't who we naturally assume makes it just novel enough to seem somewhat fresh.

A straight, flat and blunt object, Jacques Audiard's new movie sits there, like a dumb thing. It is literally what it is, and no more; that is, everything Audiard presents on screen is the sum total, with no subtext, no metaphor, no underbelly.

An incredibly manipulative, surface-oriented, impressionistic film, but it's also plainly about surfaces -- the ways in which impressions can be both misleading and not without truth, as manifested within a slow-building, mutually manipulative relationship between two people who derive a kind of high from the power their own bodies have on other people.

[Audiard] wouldn't know a subtle musical cue or composition if it were staring him in the face... Audiard's overtly heightened style is problematic because it reflects a lack of interest in mining deeper territory and a thoughtless flair for obvious symbolism. This is a cinema of blunt force trauma, of momentary awe, and all the stylized violence and lens flares merely reinforce a lack of heft in the gracefully repulsive scenarios Audiard creates.