Just because a movie is intense, intelligent, interesting to look at and the big Palme d'Or Winner at Cannes this year, does that mean we have to like it?
Rosetta is the newest movie from Belgian-born brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. It's a Belgian/French co-production, in French, with subtitles.
It centres on a young woman who is fighting, sometimes literally, to survive. Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne) is first glimpsed waxing hysterical when she gets fired from her job at a factory. It turns out she lives in a trailer park where life is a long way past tough, rooming with her alcoholic mother.
Against all the odds of poverty, neglect and unemployment, Rosetta continues to work at being alive. She tries to catch fish so that there will be enough to eat. She sells used clothes. She carefully guards her work shoes against ruin.
Starting with her inability to get her mother into a rehab situation, Rosetta's life slowly begins to fall apart. She makes one friend, a young man named Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), but their relationship operates as if he were trying to tame a wild animal.
And when Rosetta loses another job, she betrays Riquet to find another. Rosetta is obsessed with work, because it is through work she imagines she will be able to have a normal life. The film, which has plenty to say about the world of unemployment, works itself into a grim, but finally hopeful, ending.
Rosetta is filmed with the camera pretty well in Miss Dequenne's face at all times. The Dardenne brothers do plenty of hand-held work and mess with viewer notions of both visuals and narrative, so much is left to the eye of the beholder. Fine by us, but what is initially arresting begins to wear thin fairly fast.
The camera work and lack of dialogue bring Rosetta into painfully clear focus; you know her so well you can smell her. But how close do you want to be when tragedy unfolds?
Halfway through the film, we'd had enough. We got the point. After that, watching Rosetta was not unlike being pounded.
Maybe a viewer's experience is meant to mirror that of the protagonist. Gee, no thanks. Consider Rosetta brilliant, but also the feel-bad movie of the year.
(This film is rated AA)
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