As uneven as it is unconventional, this love story of two damaged souls finding strength in one another feels like new ground for its director, despite its retreading of past themes.
After delivering his finest film to date with A Prophet - a sprawling and transcendent crime-thriller that won the Grand Prix at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival - expectations were set higher than usual for Jacques Audiard to deliver another tremendous piece of cinema, something he's yet to fail in doing. Following the relationship between a nomadic kickboxing single father (Matthias Schoenaerts) and a recently paralysed Killer Whale trainer (Marion Cotillard), Rust and Bone is a mixed bag of results that remains genuine throughout, never failing to evoke the overwhelming emotions needed to drive the story along.
Alain (Schoenaerts) is a typical protagonist for Audiard; introduced feeding himself and his young son scraps from the tables of others while occupying a train, the two are between homes, Alain between jobs. He finds pay working nights as security guard and eventually through his background in fighting gets drawn into the world of illegal fighting gigs. Sleeping on his sister's sofa he has one foot in a repetitive ( yet legit) societal construct yet the other in the underworld. His eventual meeting with Stéphanie (Cotillard), a woman now wheelchair-bound after a recent accident with the very animal she lived to train, soon becomes a fascinating relationship of empowerment and frustration.
Audiard and co-writer Thomas Bidegain use this fateful meeting to usher the dynamic of two contrasting personalities as they find solace and pain in one another. The power is often in the court of Alain, whose obliviousness and emotional aloofness gives him an invincibility of sorts while the more 'aware' of the two, Stéphanie, at first finds strength in her lovers indifferent attitude towards her disability before growing to resent it as her love out matures his. This switching dynamic never fails to spark intrigue in its wavering nature and ambiguity, most notably in Stéphanie's almost fetishistic feeding off Alain's fighting physicality as a surrogate for her own loss, an interesting notion merely hinted at.
For all the raw emotional ferocity and catharsis so wonderfully displayed it can't be helped but feel that Audiard took on more than he could handle. His cinema has always walked a thin line (like his central males so often do) between the anthropological approach of the Dardenne brothers and the explosive visceral machismo of Martin Scorsese. Here, for the first time since 2001's Read My Lips (a film thematically echoed here) have the results been so uneven, with too many aspects being juggled and left ultimately in the air. At points the film doesn't seem sure what direction to take, most evident in a unnecessary plot involving Alain's participation in illegal hidden surveillance in the work place. At this point the film ventures into societal ethics and of economic repercussions that although marls a shift in narrative feels awkwardly contrived next to the stark realism of the piece so far.
Rust and Bone is from start to finish an example of great filmmaking without being a great film in itself, and within it are many great stories that end up unrealised. Despite a sense of confusion at its core, the film's central relationship between Alain and Stéphanie acts as anchor to a film destined to trail off. The performances are spectacular throughout; Schoenaerts excels in making the oblivious brute of Alain an endearing character capable of growing personably as well as in stature. Marion Cotillard reminds just how talented she is after a recent strand of disappointing performances in the US. In her native tongue she is unrivalled as a performer, it just seems that many American directors can't bring out what is so clearly there for the taking. Audiard also shows growth as a director, with this being his most visually developed film to date and one which seems to embrace visual storytelling and musical possibilities more than any of his other films. Alexandre Desplat's score is used with more gusto than before and an unforgettable use of Katy Perry's 'Firework' marks a more adventurous and unconscious choice from one of world cinema's most exciting auteurs.
Charting the day to day survival and eventual rise to power of a young man while serving a sentence in a brutal French prison, A Prophet masterfully melds an intimate personal journey and sprawling crime thriller in a fashion as rich as the works of Bresson or Mizoguchi. Jacques Audiard has created an atmospheric boundless tour de force piece of cinema, one of the finest offerings of the year, and undoubtably his best work to date.
The relatively unknown and fresh actor Tahar Rahim plays Malik, a 19 year old delinquent beginning his six year sentence. Introduced to him as he's admitted, the camera never strays far from him throughout the drama to come. Despite a close fixation on the young man we learn very little about him, omitting any hint of a backstory and only hinting at his convicted crime - the supposed assault of a police officer.
It doesn't take long before Malik is approached by a Corsican gang headed by the frightful César (Niels Arestrup) who proposition him; a new inmate (Reyeb) has arrived who will later testify in court, in their interest Malik is told that if he doesn't kill Reyeb he will be killed instead. What follows is an uncomfortable sequence of Malik preparing to reluctantly go through with the plan, he must gain Reyeb's trust, get close to him and kill him with a razor blade hidden in his mouth. The plan goes through with intense digust and marks for a cataclysmic event in Malik's life. Now working under the protection of the Corsicans, Malik rises somewhat in the prison system through learning from his new dangerous liaisons and using the prison's education plan to its full advantage.
As he rises and gains more and more control in and out of prison thanks to well orchestrated pardon days, Malick is haunted by Reyeb's death, appearing in ghostly apparitions throughout the film. Malik's guilt is shown quite literally in these visitations but is never voiced, in fact none of his thoughts or emotions are externalised here. While the film seems to paint its central protagonist as a blank slate muddied by his incarceration, it's Rahim's assured performance and natural likability that keeps us drawn to him. To be kept this emotionally distant from Malik but utterly absorbed by his decisions and general wellbeing is a mighty achievement.
A Prophet is such a rich piece of work it's difficult to decipher through the layers exactly what it's trying to say about a number of things, an obstacle that makes the film enigmatically irresistible. Audiard's films have always featured men on the fringes of society and here this is pushed even further; as Malik is pardoned on individual days for release he is a free man while remaining an inmate. More elaborately his mix of French/Arab ethnicity causes him to be segregated due to the prejudicial battle of his environment; to the Muslim inmates Malik is viewed as a Corsican and even by some of the Corsicans he serves is still seen as an Arab, thus treated disrespectfully by both camps. This sense of identity is perhaps more abstractly proposed in Reyeb's apparitions, after all, Malik never once shows any connection to his Arabic heritage (It's even hinted that he was an orphan) and through his reluctant murder of Reyeb (an Arab man) he is perhaps killing this disconnected part of himself, a sinful action with a fruitful return. One can even argue that Audiard is critiquing the justice and subsequent rehabilitation system as Malik combines his new background of organised crime with newly acquired knowledge from his economics class. With Malik's close friend Ryad released and struggling with family and minimum wage, the only answer is crime.
There is so much to be drawn from A Prophet, a film that on the surface seems like a barebones prison drama but is in fact one containing detailed nuances and more thematic levels than one would think possible in a narrative that never stops pushing forth the tropes of a standard crime thriller.
If Jacques Audiard's male protagonists have always been situated on the fringe between societal normality and damaging undertow, I likewise believe his films have to this point been delicately balanced on the edge of great filmmaking. A career full of undeniable quality, though one could see this filmmaker was yet to peak as he slowly built towards a truly exceptional piece of work. With A Prophet I believe he's arrived there.
