Orcapedic – it’s when a killer whale takes your legs.
That’s what happens to Marion Cotillard’s character in RUST & BONE (MA) the latest pic from Jacques Audiard’s latest picture. She’s a beauty on a beast for which her leg became a feast, and spends the picture navigating the journey of coming to terms with dismemberment, looking to find meaning in a limbless limbo.
Based loosely on a couple of stories from Craig Davidson’s short story set of the same name, RUST & BONE combines her plucky marine park amputee with a mixed martial artist to deliver a tough love romance of sorts.
The punk pugilist is a pants man who likes to get his leg over even with the legless lady.
On the page, the collection of eight stories begins with pugilist, Eddie, educating us about the anatomy of the hand, how twenty-seven bones are embedded there, how all vertebrates share a similar set, how some primates got more – gorilla’s thirty-two. The director has taken up the image of the gorilla and imbued his film reincarnation, now called Ali, a brutish, knuckle dragging ape, who one could suspect had only learned to stand erect recently.
What’s happened to the physical phrasing, sinewy prose and muscular narrative? It’s been misconstrued to what might pass as nuance to a Neanderthal.
Nowhere near as good as the recent stage adaptation at the Stables, somehow the film version has accentuated the ugliness and yet cops out at the finale with a happy ending which sits like a great big steaming cow pat on an ice flow. Audiences will need to grow wings to stay above the BS.
© Richard Cotter
27th March, 2013
Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews- RUST AND BONE, Sydney Arts Guide, Richard Cotter