One of my favorite films of the first few days of TIFF this year is Rust and Bone, the masterfully executed drama by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) about the relationship between Ali (Bullhead‘s Matthias Schoenaerts), a rough-and-tumble backstreet boxer, and Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), an aloof trainer of killer whales. The pair meet when Ali rescues Stephanie from a drunken jerk at the bar where he works as a bouncer, but this isn’t your typical love story, not by a long shot.

Very true to form for Audiard, Rust and Bone is, at its simplest, a methodically drawn tale about these two real, flawed human beings whose paths happen to intersect and then collide, changing them both. It’s about what defines and separates who we think we are from who we really are; it’s intellectual and philosophical without being coldly dissecting; and it’s absolutely brilliant in both script and execution. And I could try to talk around the details without giving spoilers, but there’s so much that’s interesting to explore in this film that I’d rather just give you a spoiler alert and plunge on in. So, be forewarned: Spoilers from this point on, if you haven’t seen it yet (or intend to and want to go in completely fresh), come back later.

When we first meet Ali, he’s homeless, broke and drifting around with his young son, Sam, stealing to survive, and trying to get to the home of his estranged sister. Once they arrive, Ali’s perfectly happy to turn over parenting of the boy to his sister so he can work and train to revive his boxing skills in hopes of pursuing a career of sorts as a fighter. Ali’s this impulsive sort of guy who’s content to move around fuck-wise from woman to woman and work-wise from job to job, doing whatever happens to come up, with no apparent end game in mind other than getting laid when opportunity arises, and bringing in a little cash. Eventually he falls in with a guy who makes his living installing illegal employee surveillance systems for corporations, and this becomes an ironically important point later on that underscores Ali’s penchant for acting on impulse without really thinking things through. He seems to carry no attachments to anyone or anything, not even his son, but Schoenaerts conveys this about Ali in a very matter-of-fact and unapologetic way: This is who Ali is. Expect nothing more from him.

When they first encounter each other, Stephanie is decidedly unimpressed with Ali, but he leaves his phone number for her anyhow, as much to piss off her current boyfriend in some testosterone-fueled power pissing contest as because he’s actually interested in pursuing her. He’s far from politic, this Ali; on their first encounter, he quickly rescues Stephanie from physical violence, then casually berates her when he takes her home for the revealing dress she was wearing, and for going to the bar alone to begin with, flipping from rescuer to blaming-the-victim with a speed that surprises both Stephanie and us. But we learn, pretty quickly, that this is exactly the sort of conundrum that defines Ali as a character: gallant and compassionate one minute; a completely narcissistic jerk the next, with no warning whatsoever, and more, no seeming self-awareness from him that his actions might be seen by anyone in a less than positive light. Or perhaps more to the point, he seems completely divested from any interest at all in what others think of him.

At first, Stephanie’s really not interested in Ali. Why would she be? She has a boyfriend, of sorts, and Ali hardly seems to be her type even if she didn’t. They are, as they say, of separate worlds, and when Ali walks out the door at the end of their first meeting, there’s no reason at all to think their paths need ever cross again. But then a horrific accident befalls Stephanie while she’s working with her whales, and in one moment, revealed in one terrifyingly constructed scene, her life changes forever and she’s lost both her legs from the knees down. Just like that.

It’s the way life is; one minute you’re cruising along, thinking you know everything there is to know about yourself, and the next a car runs a red light, or you find a lump in your breast, or you lose your legs in a horrible accident, and suddenly you don’t know who you are at all, and everything’s different from how you’d assumed it always would be. Life happens. And then, slowly, inevitably, you work your way through your grief for what you’ve lost and start to pull yourself together, not realizing at first that in the process of healing, you’ll change yet again.

For Stephanie, the impetus of change is Ali’s return to her life. She calls the number he left her in a moment of desperation, a need to connect with someone who knows her hardly at all. Here’s this beautiful woman, a woman who’s a bit of an exhibitionist, who enjoyed showing off her body — and her legs — to men at the nightclub, though she didn’t want to be touched. She got off on the power of knowing men were looking at her, wanting her, and now she’s lost her legs and with them her sense of power and of self, and she’s terribly afraid no one will ever look at her in that way again. Or rather, they’ll look, but it will be the lack of legs that has the power now when they see her, and they will look upon her with pity, not lust or attraction.

All of this is executed brilliantly. There are so many little moments in this film where Adiard could have taken a wrong turn down melodrama lane, where this could have been done badly, ham-fistedly, but Adiard has great instincts for when and how to keep it reined in. He reveals all this internal conflict almost entirely with visceral, visual elements, with very little in the way of overt exposition, and this is such a rare thing to see well done that this, in and of itself, makes Rust and Bone stand out from the pack. The film’s near-tragic final act, when Adiard seamlessly brings all the pieces together into a moment of truth and revelation for both Ali and Stephanie, is equally well-executed.

Performances by both Schoenaerts and Cotillard are terrific, and most definitely worthy of being part of the awards season discussion that kicks off in earnest at Toronto, as is the film itself. Rust and Bone comes out in limited release in late November, and it’s one you’ll want to catch.

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