REVIEWS CANNES REVIEWS IN BRIEF


Lawless Dir: John Hillcoat. US. 2012. 115mins John Hillcoat’s well-paced and entertaining story of bootlegging in 1931 Virginia will boost his stock as a commercial director, but it is lacking in the poetry that infused The Proposition and The Road and the mythic quality of many other retro ’30s gangster pictures from Bonnie And Clyde to The Untouchables. A superb cast of hot young actors led by Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy will ensure strong initial returns from Law- less, but several factors will hamper its pros- pects, from the often-unintelligible southern accents to the graphic violence. Mike Goodridge


CONTACT THE WEINSTEIN CO weinsteinco.com


CANNES FILM FESTIVAL Rust And Bone Dir: Jacques Audiard. Fr-Bel. 2011. 123mins


Packing arthouse style and widescreen emotional heft, Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to A Prophet pairs Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts in a tough, sexy and sometimes harrowing odd- couple love story that breezes confidently past a couple of slightly forced plot twists. Audiard’s films are always character driven, but in his last two outings the best characters have all been men. In Rust And Bone, however, he gives hot- property Cotillard a role of impressive depth. Rust And Bone has the potential to at least equal


Audiard’s two previous films, which easily passed the million-admissions mark on home turf in France. It is likely to do well internationally too. Perhaps the film lacks the genre crossover poten- tial of A Prophet, but Rust And Bone is a big film in every sense, sure-footed, stylish and confident. Not much interested in its characters’ backsto-


ries, the film opens engagingly with what appears to be the end of a different story. Penniless Ali (Schoenaerts) and his five-year-old son are leav- ing behind some trauma, heading south across France to an unnamed Cote d’Azur seaside town. Muscular Ali takes a job as a nightclub bouncer


— and it is here he meets Stephanie (Cotillard). There is a spark, though neither particularly likes the other; he sees her as just another depressed


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rich girl looking for a bit of rough, while she has man-hating and self-hating issues, finding solace only in her day job: training killer whales and putting on shows at a local aqua park. It is a mark of the script’s rapid-fire bravura that


it manages to roll the presentation of Stephanie’s job and the accident that changes her life, into a single big-dipper scene, which comes too early on to be a spoiler. A shift of perspective at the crucial moment means we never really see what hap- pened — did one of her whale charges sink its teeth into her? — but the upshot is that Stephanie wakes up in hospital with both her legs gone. It is refreshing to see a film that presents, at


least for a stretch, the opposite of Hollywood’s ‘You can do it!’ inspirational healing process: Stephanie does not want to ‘do it’, and is still sunk into a depression when Ali arrives at her apartment. She called him, not the other way round, and she finds his indifference to her and her legless state both disturbing and oddly liberating. It is a role reversal that even generates some humour when the two fall into an awkward sexual relationship. Lee Marshall


CONTACT CELLULOID DREAMS www.celluloid-dreams.com


Confessions Of A Child Of The Century Dir: Sylvie Verheyde. Fr-UK-Ger. 2011. 121mins The calamitous miscasting of UK indie rock singer Pete Doherty is, to give Mr Doherty credit, not the only flaw in this turgid adap- tation of a semi-autobiographical novel by 19th-century French writer Alfred de Mus- set. This is the second cinematic version of the novel after Diane Kurys’ Children Of The Century (1999). But whereas that version focused squarely on the scandalous rela- tionship between de Musset and female writer and saloniste George Sand, on which the novel is based, Verheyde rewrites the characters to — one can only guess — big up the decadent post-Romantic mood and not distract us with real historical people. Lee Marshall


CONTACT WILD BUNCH www.wildbunch.biz


The Angels’ Share Dir: Ken Loach. UK. 2012. 106mins The tried and trusted partnership of Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty has created one of their most accessible films in The Angels’ Share. The grim statistics behind the UK’s ‘lost generation’ of unem- ployed and unemployable young people have been transformed into a heartwarm- ing, social-realist fairytale set in Scotland and with enough rowdy humour and sweet sentiment to appeal to Loach’s dedicated global followers and beyond.


Allan Hunter


CONTACT WILD BUNCH www.wildbunch.biz


June-July 2012 Screen International 61 n


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