Rosetta

I found this film quite effecting without ever straying into crass sentimentality. Rosetta is a young girl who is full of anger and yearning. She lives with a dysfunctional alcoholic mother in a caravan park. Little is given about her past but we can understand that due to her upbringing she has limited options available to her. Her desire to be find a job (any job) is both desperate and touching. For Rosetta the prospect of a job, even a job that many in middle class society (indeed the average art house cinema goer!) might regard as mundane and without prospects, represents to her a chance to escape the existence on the outskirts of society. Her drive however raises her above the mere status of victim, and it is a credit to the lead that she conveys so much of this, without it having to be spelt out.

One thing I did find a little disconcerting was the wobbly camera technique, don't see if you are feeling a little nauseous as I was however this is only a minor criticism. Its around 90 minutes and I think well worth the investment if you like a good character based movie.

The Dardenne brothers were not incorrect when they called their Palme D'Or winning work "a war film.". It is an unremitting portrayal of the most dire hardships, centred around Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), a young, spirited girl who battles with desperate tenacity to find a job and not so much escape as merely survive in her surroundings. Her life is a bleak struggle for subsistence in a world devoid of tenderness, in which her mother (Anne Yernaux), a quasi-prostitute more concerned with the source of her next drink than her daughter, stands as an example of the potential results of such continued deprivation. When she is befriended by a waffle vendor (Fabrizio Rongione), her prior existence leaves her unsure of how to act in the presence of an affectionate, concerned face, and when he attempts to teach her to dance, she can do no more than move jerkily without rhythm, uncomfortable in the arms of another human. The arisal of an opportunity to take his job forces Rosetta to confront whether physical necessity can ever be an excuse for the betrayal of others.

What follows is a superbly wrought piece of social realism, unsentimental in its examination of the dehumanising effects of poverty. For Rosetta and many others in analogous situations of the most dire physical hardship, their material deprivation leads to an erosion emotional and mental qualities. The Dardenne brothers' ruthless directional style, laced with close-ups and unpleasant details, tangibly conveys the dirt and drudgery of Rosetta's impoverished life. Indeed, the film is palpably cold, almost painfully explicit in its depiction of an uncaring world. In addition, Dardenne's performance, for which she won the Best Actress Award at Cannes, brings to life with understated excellence her fight, not to live well, but simply to survive by any means in a world that, for her, contains few hopes and no love.

The Dardenne brothers make no excuses or apologies for their presentation of Rosetta's base strivings, delivering a film that charts how far individuals can fall. Consistently raw and at times brutal, the film nevertheless proposes no answers, expects no sympathy, it merely conveys and evokes with a clear, uncompromising eye the bleak struggle for existence that is, for some, the total of what life has to offer. Harsh, but utterly compelling viewing.

I saw "Rosetta" several weeks ago - and I still fail to recall any movie which could convey such an immediate sense of being pysically there, all the time along Rosetta's everydays' "war". We are bombarded and flooded with images 16hours per day, it takes great stregth of vision, of images, atmosphere and characters to grab at you this effectively in year 2000! Rosetta struck my as a very real encounter, with all the nonsense and ups / down of real events and life... It made me feel more of life, made me think of it more often and more intensely, it made me look into more eyes than I did before... Thank you, Luc and Jean-Pierre! and thank you, Emilie and all!

This film relies mainly on one camera to capture every little action and detail of the lead character, Rosetta, especially in her reactions to the despair she suffers throughout the film. I caught this one on IFC on May 23rd. The acting is so realistic, it is hard to imagine that the story is fictional and is shot in a documentary type style, where the hand held camera follows the actors, sneaks glimpses of their world in much the same way an ENG crew would on a story about poverty in a small European town where the economy is so bad there is little one can do to survive outside of desperate acts. In this case, Rosetta, the young girl with an alcoholic mother, lives in a trailer with no heat, has to sell re-sewn clothes to make a meager existence until she finally sees an opportunity open up for a job selling waffles at a small stand in a high traffic part of town. A young man who works there is smitten with her and offers to split some earnings from selling waffles he makes outside of his boss's knowledge. To tell you what happens next would give away the rest, but suffice to say this film is bitterly realistic, terribly sad and the ending is rather sudden but it shows some promise for the characters. The movie is shot with almost no budget, but some great camera work, some scenes a little long but edited fairly well, no music, and subtitles under the French dialog. It deserves awards for telling a very credible story demonstrating hardship of the poor in Europe and what measures one has to take to survive. I was deeply moved and driven to weep during painful scenes of the lead character's despair and what seems to be a hopeless situation. The character is genuinely portrayed by a young actress from Belgium performing extremely well for her first film role. Fine work by director and cast.

Most movies try to make you feel good. Even in the most violent or despairing films the writers always provide some sort of relief, usually a character you can identify with. "Rosetta" doesn't not offer this kind of relief. It's not violent in the usual movie fashion, and it's not even as bleak or extreme or hopeless as many social films (after all, it's only the story of a teenage girl who is looking for work), it's just that there is no "this is just a movie after all" escapism. Rosetta is a brute force in motion, obsessive, relentless, and her horizon, made of concrete or muddy Belgian suburbs, is also the movie's horizon (the camera is always focused on her or on what she sees, most of the times in close-up). The war movie comparison is really accurate : "Rosetta" is shot like the first 20 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan" and she spends her time running, attacking, retreating, attacking again, followed by an omnipresent hand-held camera. At the same time, and in spite of (or because of) its reality, her character is also elliptical, hard to pity and you're not likely to love her as you can love Ken Loach's characters, for instance. This is where the movie is a tour-de-force and truly original, but obviously some viewers will have trouble to enter Rosetta's world.