Animal attraction – a review of Rust & Bone

Killer whales, lost limbs, bare-knuckle fighting, sex and love… In the hands of a lesser director De Rouille et D'os (Rust & Bone) could easily come over as a ridiculous mess – melodramatic, mawkish and nothing more. But this is the sixth feature from expressionist auteur Jacques Audiard and if there is one thing he knows how to do it's to create an appealing underworld of outcasts; conflicted characters they we can't help but root for. 

Rust and Bone refers to the taste of blood in the mouth when, upon a blow to the face, the lips are crushed against the teeth. It is also the title of a collection of short stories by Canadian writer and amateur boxer Craig Davidson, published back in 2005. Audiard and scriptwriter Thomas Bidgain, who collaborated on the prison thriller A Prophet ("a jail movie with no women, no space, no light, no love" says Bidgain), have plucked their lead characters from two of those stories – in the book, they never meet – ramped up the sexual tension and laid a few more blows for dramatic effect. The result is one of the most unconventional and moving love stories of recent years. 

A mesmerising Marion Cotillard plays Stephanie, a killer whale trainer at an aqua park in Antibes. She is a lost soul, desensitised, a self-confessed control freak who spends her nights alone at clubs trying to turn the heads of all the guys. She is in a dead-end relationship, has lost interest in sex and with it, we can sense, all passion for life. After an altercation one night at a club Stephanie meets bouncer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a blank-faced brute drifting from one job and one-night stand to the next. His caustically honest and insensitive manner offends her at first. He makes a pass, she rejects him. But after disaster strikes and a freak accident at the park renders Stephanie distraught and hopeless, a friendship blossoms for those very reasons. He is the one person who won't patronise her or exclude her from everyday life.

On another level, the challenge of taming Ali excites her. She's aroused for the the first time in years. As Schoenaerts recently explained: "My character’s pretty animalistic. When I say animalistic, I mean he reacts very instinctively to things, he doesn’t react intellectually; he doesn’t think, he just acts and reacts. That’s where the honesty comes in, because his tenderness is not a choice, he doesn’t choose to be tender as he doesn’t choose to be violent; violence and tenderness both come naturally."

However Ali is not easy to like. He is solitary, selfish and insular. (We're not told why. It's refreshing when a director doesn't try to answer all our questions.) Accompanying him from Belgium is his five-year-old son who obviously needs constant attention. When we first meat them, Ali steals and scavenges to feed them both. But soon he passes responsibility over to his sister, with whom they have come to stay. His hands are always in the fridge and all over several women he beds, without a care for anyone else. His thoughtlessness even threatens the livelihood of his sister. Through a night security job he soon hears of bare-knuckle fights organised by gypsies and relishes the opportunity to not only earn money but indulge his thirst for action.

Ali with his five-year-old son, who he is put in charge of. A responsibility that does not sit well on his shoulders

Ali turns to bare-knuckle fighting to earn money… and to sate his thirst for action

But it is through his relationship with Stephanie that Ali begins to redeem himself. He takes her to the beach to swim, he refuses to treat her any differently despite the recent tragedy ("do you even realise?" she questions, dumbfoundedly) and offers sexual favours to see if "everything is working down there". In a moment of delightful levity he says he's "OP", operational and at her service. By beginning to inhabit the more primal world of Ali she begins to live again. 

The painter's analogy is a well-worn one in cinema but it is so apt in the case of Audiard. The surreal treatment of the accident by Audiard, together with cinematographer Stephane Fontain and editor Juliette Welfling, transforms a potentially gruesome moment into a something more transcendental. A wash of colours and celestial imagery. Audiard says that with this film he and Bidegain were trying to find an equilibrium between realism and stylisation. And that is apparent throughout the film, whether it's Stephanie's return to the aqua park, the potentially erotic undertones of her first few tastes of sex as a woman without legs, Ali's fights (where the audience, through the eyes of voyeur Stephanie, is thrilled by the slow-motion brutality before them) or the film's denouement on the frozen lake. 

Stephanie, finally able to talk again with the help of prosthetics, visits an old friend at the aqua park

One of Davidson's stories that Bidegain adapted with Audiard is called Life in the Flesh. This became an overarching theme for the whole film. "Rust & Bone is about a world where people have just their body left to sell," he explains. "The characters are normal people, but their destiny is magnified by accidents." From a viewer's perspective, the resulting tension between brutality and harmony as these characters fight against the fate that befalls them is great cinema, particularly in the hands of Audiard, a master of patient, poetic exposition. He's often explored the lives of ordinary people with age-old demons, fighting for survival and some sense of fulfillment. In A Self-made Hero he made Mathieu Kassovitz's spineless post-Second World War draft dodger an accomplished impersonator in the Resistance; in Read My Lips Vincent Cassell's selfish criminal comes to the rescue of Emmanuelle Devos's deaf office secretary and becomes "a hero in a disaster of his own making"; in The Beat That My Heart Skipped Romain Duris' debt-collecting thug is a romantic who longs to escape to another life as a concert pianist; in A Prophet we witness Tahir Rahim's ascent from pawn to gangster, from nobody to made man, from sinner to saint.

Audiard sets about crafting another intricate scene

In the first of these examples, the French director's second film when it was released in 1996, the actor Albert Dupontel utters this basic truth about all of Audiard's leading men: "Losers can seem like winners, devils like angels and cowards like heroes." Ali is the latest flawed individual to be confronted with a life-changing situation and it is he who is the beating heart of this film, not Stephanie as many would expect. I did feel that Cotillard' s character faded far too quickly into the background towards the end but that shouldn't detract from either the quality of her performance or the brooding intensity of Schoenaerts who makes his character's volte face entirely believable. 

Audiard is undoubtedly one of cinema's most singular and affecting filmmakers, a man whose work is capable of stimulating the parts that others just can't reach. Rust & Bone stands up to anything in his already formidable oeuvre but observes humanity in an often inhumane world from a slightly different angle. It questions what we have, who we love and asks what would happen if these were taken from us.

And the final word must go to Schoenaerts. Having announced his arrival with an impressive turn in Flemish thriller Loft and displayed a De Niro-like dedication to his craft in the Oscar-nominated Bullhead (he gained 30 kilogrammes, ate 1,000 cans of tuna and trained six days a week for a year and a half for his ferocious portrayal of a crooked cattle farmer addicted to steroids), the imperious Belgian has confirmed his status as a major talent.

Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone It all begins in the North of France. Ali suddenly finds himself with a five year-old child on his hands. Sam is his son, but he hardly knows him. Homeless, penniless and friendless, Ali takes refuge with his sister in Antibes. There things improve immediately.

PS The killer whale debate

Briefly, it is worth noting that Animal Defenders International have called for a boycott of this film because it shows orcas in captivity. In a recent press release the organisation argues that prolonged isolation from natural habitats encourages unusual behaviour (including aggression) and significantly reduces life expectancy. 

You would be a fool to argue that captivity is a good thing but I must agree with author Craig Davidson, who wrote a detailed response on his blog. This was a rash outburst from the ADI. If Audiard and his team shoot scenes at an aqua park that does not mean that they are supporting or promoting captivity and cruelty to animals. If anything, this is a cautionary tale showing mankind what happens if you try to capture and contain wildlife. Let's hope that Audiard makes the statement that the ADI wants and addresses the issue in the context of this film. A little common sense, please.

Free speech under fire

Keir Starmer is a busy man. Besides being pulled into the increasingly sordid Saville scandal (more on that another time), the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) finds himself in the midst of one of the most contentious debates in history of media law. 

It all revolves around the huge popularity of social networks and the potential for unfettered users to persistently harass or incite hatred. Facebook now has more than one billion users and there are more than 250 million tweets posted each day. In turn, there are more offensive comments about others being made than ever before. For this reason it is even more important to review legislation and the limits on freedom of speech in light of new technology.

In the UK alone, the number of social media-related harassment cases has risen from 2,347 in 2010 to 2,490 in 2011. And that number could rise sharply. Yesterday, Starmer addressed a gathering at London School of Economics (LSE), explaining that "if you retweet, you commit an offence under the Act." The legislation in question is Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which outlaws sending a tweet that is "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". According to the Act, a person can also be prosecuted if he or she "causes any such message or matter to be so sent". 

This has set alarm bells ringing in the ears of the Twitter community and libertarians nationwide, many of whom believe that the right to free speech should be absolute. In fact, Alex Macgillivray, the general counsel for Twitter, is known for describing the microblogging service as "the free-speech wing of the free speech party". For how much longer though… At the beginning of this year the micro-blogging service announced that it would now be able to selectively block tweets on a country-by-country basis, acknowledging that "different countries would have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression".

So far, courts in the UK have erred on the side of caution, but that isn't to say that they have ruled with consistency. In 2010, Paul Chambers was arrested for tweeting: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" He was found guilty at Doncaster magistrates court, and went on to lose his first appeal and a High Court appeal, before a second High Court appeal finally saw his conviction quashed on July 27 2012. Chambers' tweet was retweeted thousands of times by sympathisers; based on Starmer's view at LSE today, those people would theoretically be liable for prosecution.

In March, Swansea student Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in prison for racially offensive comments on Twitter about the seriously ill Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba. The judge described the comments as "vile and abhorrent" and added that "there is no alternative to an immediate prison sentence". The decision was welcomed by a mass of sympathisers, but it was not without its fierce critics, who claimed that Stacey was not guilty of a public order offence and that the sentence was highly excessive. Others point to regularly outspoken tweeters such as Frankie Boyle and wonder how he gets away with half the offensive things he says. Perhaps it's because he's a comedian; it's a joke so he doesn't mean it…

Last month the CPS decided not to take action against Daniel Thomas, a semi-professional footballer at Port Talbot Town FC, who posted homophobic messages on Twitter relating to the Olympic divers Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) stressed the importance of the sender's intention and ruled that his actions, "however misguided", were intended to be humorous to family and friends, and not grossly offensive to the divers.

Earlier this month, 20-year-old Azhar Ahmed was sentenced to 240 hours of community service for a Facebook post saying, "all soldiers should die and go to hell" following the deaths of six British soldiers. Soon after, Matthew Woods, also 20, was jailed for 12 weeks after posting "sick jokes" about missing girl April Jones on Facebook.

Whether you are aggrieved by the curbing of free speech or alarmed by the number of people casually causing offence, one thing is clear: the situation is getting out of hand and the Communications Act, conceived at a time when few could imagine just how instantaneous the transition from private thoughts to mass communication would become, is not comprehensive and clear enough to address the myriad situations that arise.

Starmer's position is quite clear. On BBC's Newsnight a fortnight ago he acknowledged a person's "right to be offensive and insulting" as well as 'the chilling effect" that an amendment to legislation could have on free speech. But he wants guidelines to be drawn up that will help to clarify the situations where prosecution is justified. He has mooted two categories: where there is a "campaign or harassment or a general credible threat" and " where communications are merely offensive or grossly offensive". (The former would require a high threshold of criminality and the latter would not necessarily be ring-fenced from prosecution.)

Over the next few months the CPS will consult lawyers, academics and representatives from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook – both of whom are keen to be very hands off, relying mainly on community policing – as well as leading sports bodies including the Football Association, the Rugby Football Union and the British Olympic Association. The results will be shared before Christmas.

Ultimately, the aim should be to preserve democracy, outlining how the law will be clearly and consistently applied when an individual oversteps the mark. That is the challenge for Starmer and his colleagues – which words or deeds would most of us consider to be grossly offensive? We have all seen how revolutionary an advancement the internet, more affordable technology and the creation of social networks have been in giving a voice to those who were once disregarded or, worse still, suppressed. Look at the legitimate battle against "The Great Firewall of China", the toppling of dictators in Egypt and Tunisia (not that I am disregarding the power of the human spirit) or one "anonymous cyber-dissident's" exposure of corruption in Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, the internet is not a parallel universe where people can roam free, attack, threaten or defame others and not expect there to be consequences. The inhibition-loosening age of the internet and rapidly advanced remote communication have made many of us intemperate and uncivil. People don't think hard enough before they act: that comment on YouTube or under a news article; Tweet exchanges that quickly escalate.

You may not be seen but you are heard nonetheless, and you're not necessarily taken less seriously, as lawyer Keith Ashby recently claimed, just because you're not face to face. Social networks have amplified people's voices, sometimes for the good, other times less so. One person co-ordinates troops for a riot and mass looting; another organises a mass clean-up operation in their neighbourhood. For that reason those who misuse social networks must be held to account if they act with malice or embark on a campaign of abuse and incitement to violence.

It is not in anyone's best interests to have more prosecutions and a more litigious society in the UK. So let's combine efforts to avoid any more nasty incidents: responsibility for policing social networks should be shared between the community, the courts (where necessary) and above all, the service providers. Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, speaking in relation to a review of the Defamation Bill, has said that, "Website operators are in principle liable as publishers for everything that appears on their sites, even though the content is often determined by users." I would extend part of that responsibility to highly successful companies such as Facebook and Twitter, encouraging them to invest more in moderation and work more closely with government or police departments. The privilege of being able to voice your opinion to millions should be taken away from those who don't act respectfully towards their peers.

Meanwhile, this debate plays out across the world. In India this August, extremists in two rival communities provoked a full-scale sectarian conflict by using Twitter to spread rumours that each side is attacking the other, supporting the charges with falsified pictures of purported victims. Violence erupted in Assam where both communities are based, killing 80 people and displacing 300,000. The rumours on Twitter quickly followed, causing tens of thousands of people elsewhere in India to flee for fear of their lives. After a tense stand-off between Twitter and the government, the social network agreed to remove six troublesome sites but not the spoof accounts of those impersonating and ridiculing the prime minister.

I do hope that Starmer and his team take this opportunity to lead the way and formulate a just and pragmatic set of guidelines that others can adopt. Common sense should prevail, together with an inate sense of right and wrong. Chambers' airport outburst did not constitute a "credible and genuine threat" in my view, although perhaps he should have chosen his words more carefully, but the comments of Stacey, Ahmed and Woods were indefensible in their context.