Rosetta

Released 1999
Stars Emilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione
Directed by Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne

Rosetta is as much a raw sore as a movie. When it was shown on the very last day of the Cannes film festival in May, at its world premiere, it overwhelmed jaded (and exhausted) international critics, as well as the jury, which awarded it the Golden Palm. A development of the great tradition of postwar Italian neo-realism, this kind of film is not new: Hand-held, stumbling, continually out-of-breath camera; claustrophobically tight close-ups on the protagonist; the most minimal narrative and the sketchiest of plots; barely enough dialogue to warrant hiring a sub-titler; an ugly, depressing location. And, of course, it's winter. But though we've seen it and its variants all before, we seem unable to get enough of it. Somehow, we think (though we know that this too is an illusion), that it's cinema -- and therefore life -- at its purest, most honest, and most raw.

In the Dardenne brothers' film, the center of all this attention is Rosetta, played with reckless passion and utter conviction by an 18-year-old neophyte named Emilie Dequenne, who shared the Best Actress award at Cannes with another non-professional, Severine Caneele from L'Humanite. Rosetta lives in a dismal trailer park with an alcoholic and slightly slutty mother with whom she constantly argues. She is desperate to get away, have a life of her own, but more immediate matters, such as having something to eat, get in the way of her plans. In the first few minutes of the film, she's fired from her job in a bakery and rather than passively accepting her fate, she fights back, fruitlessly of course, like a wild animal. 

Not everyone will want to stay with this compulsively downbeat film, whose bleakness does, if truth be told, finally get a bit wearing by the end. But watching it, we realize we've been given a privileged inside view of a world that, while ghastly and dispiriting, seems, within the illusion of cinema (as film theorist Andre Bazin said in the late 1940's about De Sica's classic The Bicycle Thief), utterly true.

Summary by Peter Brunette