Posts tagged Edith Piaf

“French Murkiness”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Rust and Bone is a French film, and sometimes that is all that needs to be said, but in this case that describes only half of it.

It stars Marion Cotillard, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the 2007 La Vie en Rose, in which she portrayed French songstress Edith Piaf.

In this film, she plays an orca trainer at a Marineland in the south of France who has a tragic accident.

When the film opens, we see a man named Ali traveling with his five-year-old son, Sam, on a train to southern France.

Once they arrive, they go to his sister’s house, whom he hasn’t seen in five years, where she is living with another man, Richard.

When Anna gets home from work as a store clerk, Richard says to her, “Some reunion. Not kissing your brother?”

We don’t know the reason that Ali and Sam have moved to stay with Anna and Richard, but it could very well be that Ali has fallen on hard times.

Ali gets a job as a bouncer at a nightclub, and one night he meets Stephanie, rescuing her from a fight and afterwards taking her back to her home, where he treats his bloodied hands by putting them in ice.

Then Stephanie has an accident where she works at Marineland, and she loses both her legs below the knees.

About four months later, she calls Ali, and he comes to visit her. She now gets around by a wheelchair, and Ali takes her out to the beach, where he goes swimming and convinces her to go swimming, too.

So, the rest of the film is about the growing relationship between these two people. She is physically crippled, and he is emotionally crippled.

Ali changes jobs, and eventually he makes extra money by fighting in underground kickboxing fights, which he is successful at and which fascinates Stephanie.

Stephanie gets some artificial legs and is able to get around more easily, but Ali gets into trouble where he is working as a security guard, and he has to leave town.

However, even though Cotillard has received praise for this film, you might ask what the point is, especially with the phony ending.

Rust and Bone might be to your liking, or you might think it is just French murkiness.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”