If you hired Albert Camus to write “Rocky,” it might come out something like “Rust and Bone,” a quintessentially French effort to combine pugilism and sentimentality. But if your big lug is a big jerk, you’re not doing it right.
An aloof Matthias Schoenaerts plays Ali, a skilled kickboxer with a 5-year-old son named Sam (Armand Verdure) who drifts into the home of his sister Anna (Corinne Masiero) in the south of France. A gig as a nightclub bouncer brings him into contact with the lovely but unfortunate Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), a trainer of killer whales at a Sea World-like park who loses both legs below the knee in a gruesome accident.
Mortification of the flesh seems to draw the two together: Stéphanie is turned on by the bare-knuckle brawling Ali engages in for money, while the mere glimpse of Stéphanie’s prosthetic legs sufficiently inspires Ali to win a brutal, bloody, dentally damaging fight with another man.
So: Missing legs meets missing teeth, and all is well? Not really. As the two damaged bodies conduct an entirely loveless sexual relationship, writer-director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet”) keeps a cold, clinical distance from both of them. Cotillard, talented as she is, doesn’t much explore the psychological ramifications of losing one’s legs and seems mainly interested in the part because it means the opportunity to drag her digitally created stumps across the floor in several scenes (and to be tenderly picked up and placed on the toilet by her sack buddy). The visual effects are amazing, but they don’t make up for acting that is restrained to an uninsightful fault.
Worse, Ali is a careless lout to his bed partner and a lousy father whose actions result in his son enduring a major blow to the head. In the final minutes, the emotional temperature rises considerably, but it’s far too late to make us care, and the closing seems forced. The intent, seemingly, is for an art-house audience to feel it has paid enough in brutality, misfortune and poverty to have earned an appropriately limited amount of sentimentality. But Audiard shouldn’t be surprised if viewers join him in feeling detached.