Jacque Audiard's De rouille et d'os | Rust and Bone (2012)

Jacques Audiard's film is an adaptation of a collection of the Canadian writer Carig Davison's short stories entitled Rust and Bone. It stars the penniless Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) who takes his young son Sam from Belgium to the south of France to his sister Anna (Corinne Masiero), who puts him up and Ali finds a job as a bouncer in a night club. It's there that Ali interrupts an altercation between Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) and a man, drives her home in her car as she's in no state to drive, and just leaves his phone number just in case.

Months later he's surprised that she contacts him, and in fact it's a matter of some desperation: she was a killer whale tamer but has had an accident in which she's left in a wheelchair with stumps for legs and is suicidal. Ali gives her hope, takes her to the sea where she develops a new enthusiasm for life. Ali becomes a security officer, begins a casual sexual relationship with Stéphanie while he makes money on the side by illegal boxing, which worries Stéphanie as she's developing a serious interest in him.

The crunch comes in a night club in which Ali disappears with a girl for a one-night stand, leaving Stéphanie to go through the motions of being chatted up by an oafish guy who obviously (unllike Ali) doesn't accept her handicap, doesn't accept her as a sexual being.

In the end Ali and Stéphanie both make it as a couple, although both have saved each other: Ali has turned her back into a woman, and Stéphanie has saved a man in danger of drowning (as Sam nearly did physically) in his own existential nothingness. (The OP? (opé?) messages greatly humanise the story, showing (as if it were needed) the potential modern importance of the mobile phone to cinema, which has in some ways destroyed the old-fashioned plots.)