Rust and Bone (2012)

Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone arrives from Cannes with a ten-minute standing ovation and the sort of critical reverence usually reserved for films that explain themselves. This one does not. Ali, a broke single father, drifts from Belgium to Antibes, finds work as a nightclub bouncer and a security guard, and falls into the orbit of Stephanie, an orca trainer who loses both legs in a workplace accident. What follows is a romance conducted largely through bodies: swimming, fighting, sex, the slow negotiation of prosthetics. The film is raw, unsentimental, and entirely uninterested in instructing us.

Where the picture brushes against contemporary social sensibilities, it does so sideways. Stephanie's body, her stumps, her artificial limbs, her blunt arrangement of casual sex with Ali, are rendered without pity and without a thesis. That registers as a kind of honesty about disability and self-acceptance even as advocacy stays absent. A minor subplot has management installing surveillance cameras and firing Ali's sister for taking home expired food. It is a glancing look at precarious labor, offered and then abandoned. The multiethnic texture of Antibes sits in the frame unremarked. Nobody delivers a speech about it.

For the most part this is a melodrama of intimacy, and Audiard keeps his themes in the flesh and the violence, not in the dialogue. No sermons, no slogans, no historical rewriting. The film concerns a man who punches through ice to save his son and fractures both hands, and a woman who learns to walk again on borrowed legs. It is a serious work about damaged people, which is not the same thing as a message. The standing ovation was, on the evidence, earned.