Special Affects – Reconfiguring Melodrama in De Rouille et d'os (Rust and Bone, Audiard 2012)

Jacques Audiard’s De rouille et d’os/Rust and Bone provides a further example of this filmmaker’s sustained attention to the powerful narrative, filmic and affective impacts of genre hybridisation – in this case the knowing mix of realist and melodramatic modes. This article sets Audiard’s film in the broader critical context of shifting approaches to melodrama and argues that Rust and Bone represents an important re-purposing of the melodramatic mode that reconfigures the trope of embodied suffering associated with melodrama, to resituate the body as a site of affective communication, social agency and resistance. The article concludes by suggesting that, whilst critical and popular reception of the film has focused on its use of the special effects used to support Marion Cotillard’s performance as a double amputee, the film’s re-purposing of melodrama can be seen to create a special affect that is no less striking.