Rust and Bone (2012)

RUST AND BONE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Jacques Audiard
    Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, 
    Armand Verdure, Céline Sallette
This movie's about coping with damage, emotional and physical. Marion Cotillard plays a woman named Stéphanie, who trains and performs with orcas at a water show in the South of France. At least, she does that till an accident at work forces the amputation of both of her legs. Matthias Schoenaerts plays a man named Ali, a bare-knuckles boxer, nightclub bouncer and security guard, an impoverished single dad with a five-year-old son. It's a romance, but a grudging one. Stéphanie and Ali are both closed off and self-destructive, as hard on each other as they are on themselves. They're not much for sentiment, either of them, and they need each other more than either of them can acknowledge or express. Toward the end, they're on the phone, talking. There's a long pause, and you think this is it, they're going to hang up, they're finished. But they don't, and they're not, because, after all, where else would either of them go? The whole movie's like that. Like its two flawed, damaged characters, it doesn't go out of its way to make you care. And you end up caring anyway.