Romantic but pitiless, fearlessly emotional as well as edgy, “Rust and Bone” is a powerhouse. It’s the kind of risky venture only a consummate filmmaker could manage, and then only with the help of actors who are daring and accomplished.

With director Jacques Audiard in charge and Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts as stars, all the pieces have fallen exactly into place.

Although “Rust and Bone” is old-fashioned and sentimental at its core, this film’s idea of romance is not everyone’s, and it’s certainly not Jane Austen’s.

The story details the relationship between an arrogant trainer of orcas whose world is shattered when she loses her legs and a brutish street fighter whose thoughts are exclusively about himself.

It’s set in a bleak and violent contemporary France where we worry about the protagonists’ physical and psychological well-being because we know we have to.

Audiard, whose last film was the exceptional, Oscar-nominated “A Prophet,” has always been interested in extreme situations and the people who make their way in them. This time, he’s created an unapologetically melodramatic film (inspired in part by Lon Chaney/Tod Browning silents such as “The Unknown”) whose aim, he said frankly at the film’s Cannes premiere, was “to look emotions in the eye and take them to the end, even to risk going too far and being excessive and ridiculous.”

But if “Rust and Bone” is an unashamed melodrama, it is melodrama executed by a film artist with a gift for the genre.