After one of our airport runs at Christmas time, we managed to go see the French film Rust and Bone at the Uptown in Minneapolis. The film, though far from perfect, has two great things going for it: Marion Cotillard and a point of view.
I have enjoyed Cotillard in her previous films, but this one shows what a powerful actress she really is. She plays Stephanie, a killer whale trainer at a European Sea World who is in a disabling accident when a whale turns on her and attacks. As she struggles to adapt to her new life we get, in glimpses, in beautiful, perfect moments, her love of the animal and animal world, her acceptance that the whale was just being a whale, and the strange, vicarious way that the work and the relationship to the whale satisfied her own animal nature.
We get to see this in one gorgeous scene where she returns to the park and goes through the commands with the whale from behind a glass viewing wall. (I’ll never hear Katy Perry’s “Firework” the same way again.) But mostly we see it in her relationship with Ali, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, a street fighter doing a miserable job of caring for his young son but who does a pretty good job of caring for her. Schoenaerts is the whale here, and his destructive animal nature asserts itself again and again. The guy has a long way to go, but his relationship with Stephanie helps him stumble toward success, as a father and as a man.
I’ve put a bunch of films in the Netflix watch instantly queue that I tracked down from last year’s film festivals, and last night we watched Bullhead. We were surprised that it also starred Matthias Schoenaerts, but also by the similarities to Rust and Bone. In this film, in one of the most brutal acts on a child I’ve ever seen on film, it is the young Jacky (Shoenaerts) who is disabled, literally emasculated. He has to take testosterone, which he gets in increasing quantities on the black market, to maintain his masculinity.
In this way, Jacky is metaphorically aligned with the cows his family raises, injecting them with illegal growth hormones until they can’t give birth naturally and are bulky and deformed. Jacky is quite deformed on the inside, while his exterior is a muscled, bulky hulk, a show of masculinity that he falsely possesses.
In some ways, Bullhead was the better film. There is interesting stuff going on about Flemish and French identity in Belgium. There are compelling minor characters and a good corruption/black market plot in addition to the main identity story.
We were convinced that these films must have had the same writer and director, but that’s not the case. They are not even from the same country, although it’s very interesting to see how Europe is becoming a more unified producer of films.
There was a time you couldn’t pay me to watch a French film, which was guaranteed to be strange and incomprehensible (and neither funny nor satisfyingly serious). But in recent years, films like Welcome, a French film about a Kurdish refugee trying to cross the French channel to England, have won me over. In both of the films reviewed here, there are things to ponder even in the large cultural references of an Americanized world: growth hormones in beef, Sea World. The moral universe has shifted, in ways that are both banal and profound.
There’s no doubt this is a serious time in Europe. And in these times, we’re the beneficiaries of films exploring identity, from ethnic and national identity to the core identity of what it means to be a man or woman and to be a human being, which speaks well of the future of film and of Europe.