This low-budget Canadian film does a number of things exceptionally well, starting with the milieu: Hamilton 2021 just scrapes by as Montreal 1984 because much of the production is staged in back alleys and empty streets where the seams of contemporaneity are strained but do not quite burst. More effective is the blend of English, French, and Cree that the cast speak, even if they have to struggle to do so, because the issue of languages either clashing, mingling or mixing is inseparable from the clash of identities that is central to Rosie's dramatic problems.
When her estranged sister dies, a single working-class woman, Frédérique (Melanie Bray), already struggling to get by, is saddled with a six-year-old niece she has never met. As Fred gets evicted, lives on the street, and moves in with her trans best friends, she flirts with regaining her independence by returning Rosie to an overloaded social services system that is just as ambiguous as she is in its need to dump the little girl somewhere, anywhere. The date, after all, is 1984 and Fred and her sister are traumatized veterans of the "Sixties Scoop," in which the federal government separated First Nations children from their parents en masse. Although Rosie is the title character, Fred becomes the film's central figure as, despite her well-founded doubts about taking on the responsibility, she is gradually possessed by the need to save Rosie from suffering the same fate.
The casting is one of the things the film gets right, from Rosie herself, played by the remarkable Keris Hope Hill, to small roles such as Brandon Oakes as Jigger, a homeless Cree man who has hung on to an extent of hard-won dignity. Constant Bernard and Alex Trahan, as the trans couple Flo and Mo, also make distinctive spaces for themselves. With Bray a compelling central figure as a woman who will come into her own, if the world will just let her, this colourful ad hoc family hang together as Flo attends her mother's funeral as a trans woman - facing up to her disapproving father to do so - and Mo overcomes stage fright to flower as a performer (of course, with the help of the adorable Rosie) at the local karaoke bar.
There is some very effective writing - writer/director Gail Maurice knows how to write scenes, how to write for the actors so that their silences are just as effective as their speeches, and most importantly, how to move things along. It becomes evident, perhaps a little too soon in the film, that things are going to work out for everyone and that they will live together in a state of happy precariousness, every problem soothed by the effervescent Rosie. At the premier screening in Hamilton, each burst of cuteness by Hope Hill was absorbed by the audience with uncritical adoration and even applause - what else can you do? - but its reliance on the young actor's (admittedly irresistable) cuteness tends to undercut the tension that, if sustained, would have made Rosie a more effective drama. That said, any production that can achieve the victories that Rosie achieves on its slender resources has to be applauded.
