Jacques Audiard
Un sapore di ruggine e ossa

"A Taste of Rust and Bone" is a horrible title for a movie: I don't know if the original title, "De rouille et d'os", is better, but at least it's in French and sounds sweeter... a bit like Genoveffa and Genevieve.

Jacques Audiard, the director, is a maverick type who uses the cinematic medium to slam a big slap right in your face: an apparently banal story transforms into something difficult to tell and perhaps difficult to fully understand.

I watched it some time ago, and the temptation to write about it immediately dashed against a wall of ifs and buts.

He is a single father who doesn't know his son but has to take care of him because the mother has just dumped him in his arms, traveling from the north to the south of France, landing in his sister's house, who lovingly looks after the nephew. He looks for work, and in a disco where he works as a bouncer, he meets Her, an orca trainer, beautiful and perfect, whom he has to protect from a bully's attack: He more or less brazenly leaves her his cell phone number.

Up to this point... who cares?, exactly. The story sweeps down like an avalanche when due to an accident She loses both legs: from this point on, it's another thing, that cell phone number will mark the boundary between a non-life and a life linked to an SMS or rather to three letters "Ope?"

In short: the (?) friendship between the two leads the girl to confide that among the things she had to give up is making love, and the young man is available at any time, if free, to accommodate her. The request must come via SMS, where "Ope?" means Operative?: simple and ingenious, if not rather raw and surreal. No feeling seems to touch the young man's heart: an exchange of favors, nothing more.

I haven't made any spoilers, the plot is told everywhere in more detail, the film doesn't end here, but the rest is not to be told but to be seen.

A story that talks about current times, about the crisis, about a savage and bitter world where people suffer, fight for survival, and find themselves masters of only one thing, their own body with which they sometimes have to make peace.

PS: among the questions that came to mind, there's one I'd like to throw back at the men: how many friends and/or acquaintances with whom you'd like to exchange that SMS would you invite to watch Jacques Audiard's beautiful film to share its message? Vvmb...