'Rust and Bone' Movie Review: Marion Cotillard and Oscar Mania Sony Pictures Classics Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard Rust and Bone Director: Jacques Audiard Studio: Sony Pictures Classics Actors: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Céline Sallette One of the most repellent phrases in the English language is "Oscar buzz." The nattering about contenders for the Academy Awards begins more than a year before Oscar night, at Sundance; it balloons at Cannes in May and festers fully in early September at the Toronto Film Festival. From then through the end of the year, and on and on through the Golden Globes and beyond, the public is besieged by countless commercials for Oscar hopefuls, and by "news reports" that are really stealth-marketing for the movies in question. And critics are asked to put aside a cool analysis of films, which is their job, and to handicap the odds of a movie or a performer getting nominated. Falling into this trap diminishes the work, for it suggests that a prize given by 6,000 rich, mostly elderly Hollywood businessmen and their employees is the highest honor a cinema artist can receive. We should not ask whether a great film like Michael Haneke's Amour is Oscar-worthy, but whether the Motion Picture Academy is Amour-worthy. The tawdry irrelevance of award-giving is mitigated slightly when the film or actor is foreign. Then, at least, the citation helps to promote work that the mass of moviegoers would not hear of, let alone be persuaded to see, without these Good Filmmaking seals of approval. READ: TIME's exhaustive coverage of the 2012 Oscar campaign Beginning with its world premiere at Cannes, and flourishing at Toronto, Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os) has attracted attention less for what it is - a romance of rehabilitation, featuring splendid performances and outrageous plot contrivances - than for what it might be next February. The drum roll of publicity that sounded on the red carpet at Cannes" Grand Palais is meant to reach its climax on the red carpet next Oscar night. Rust and Bone certainly arrives with a pedigree. Its director and cowriter is Jacques Audiard, whose prison drama A Prophet was nominated for the foreign-language Academy Award. More to the Oscar point, the film's female lead is Marion Cotillard, the grave, luminous French star who earned an Academy Award playing Edith Piaf in La vie en rose, and was just the second performer to win a Best Actress Oscar for a performance in a foreign language after Sophia Loren in Two Women in 1962. As far back as Cannes, several reviewers at the French festival cited Cotillard as a sure bet for an Oscar nomination. (READ: Rebecca Winters Keegan on Marion Cotillard in La vie en rose) That may be the case, not for the quality of her performance, which is considerable, but because her role is the kind the Academy loves - a woman who suffers a horrible twist of fate and learns to fight back. Stéphanie, whom everyone calls Stéph, loves her job training orca whales and directing them in shows at the Marineland in Antibes, a few miles down the Côte d'Azur from Cannes. When an orca leaps out of the pool and crushes Stéph's body, she loses both legs at the knee. She nurses her physical and psychological wounds alone, until deciding to call Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts), whom everyone calls Ali. They had met only once, when a fight broke out at The Annex night club and he, the bouncer, drove her home. Ali has his own limitations. As Stéph is physically infirm, so Ali is an emotional cripple. A bruising figure with dreams of becoming an Ultimate Fighter, he has come south with his five-year-old son Sam (Armand Verdure) to stay with his sister Anna (Corinne Masiero). Ali has a responsibility he is hardy suited for. He can feed himself and Sam with the half-eaten sandwiches left by other travelers, and steal merchandise from a shop when he lands in Antibes. But his parenting skills are as limited as, frankly, his interest in his son. Ali would rather watch fights on video than keep an eye on the boy. READ: Richard Corliss on Marion Cotillard in Nine He does, however, keep watch on Stéph. Deflecting her anger - when he asks if anyone comes to help her, she replies, "Help me, what? Walk?" - he buoys her spirits by taking her to the Cannes Croisette for a therapeutic swim in the Mediterranean. Gradually, they become erotic partners: she wants to know if her sexual apparatus "still works" and he, a veteran of one-night stands, amicably obliges. Stéph also develops a fascination for Ali's budding side career as a fighter in illegal matches. In the middle of the film, Rust and Bone becomes a French Rocky, with Stéph as both the fighter's girlfriend and his manager. For all the grit of its milieu and the stark cinematographic contrasts of blinding brightness and midnight murkiness, this is a weepie movie of the old school; Kings Row and An Affair to Remember spring to mind. Audiard and his cowriter Thomas Bidegain unashamedly employ all tricks of audience manipulation. Ali is taking a beating in one fight, until he sees Stéph step awkwardly into his sightline and he is inspired to win the match. Toward the end, the writers stoop to imperiling a child in order to push Ali toward true fatherhood. LIST: Find all the French films in the all-TIME 100 Movies Many a viewer will buy into these plot devices - they have certainly worked enough times before - and those who don't should still be impressed by the two stars" unforced intimacy. Schoenaerts, who played the crippled stud of Bullhead (nominated for a foreign language film Oscar), exudes a masculinity that is both effortless and troubled; he is the thug who treats Stéph like a woman. And Cotillard demonstrates again her eerie ability to write complex feelings on her face, as if from the inside, without grandstanding her emotions. Stéph's tenderest moments are not with Ali but with the whales. The first evidence of her recuperation comes as she sits in her wheelchair miming the hand signals she had used to direct the orcas. Later, visiting Marineland for the first time since her accident, she stands before the pool's huge glass in front of an orca, hand-signaling the creature to follow her commands. It is the wordless communion of two souls - as different from each other as Stéph is from Ali - and represents the purest love story in this sometimes engrossing, sometimes exasperating romance. In these scenes, Cotillard shows she doesn't need the validation of the Motion Picture Academy or any other prize-givers. Her strong, subtle performance is gloriously winning on its own.