Rosetta
Belgium/France 1999
Reviewed by Lizzie Francke
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
aLiège, Belgium, the present. Rosetta, a proud young woman, has just been made redundant. She returns home to the caravan site where she lives to find her alcoholic mother has been turning tricks in exchange for drink.
Determined to find new work, Rosetta asks about vacancies at a local waffle stand run by a young man named Riquet. Later, Riquet turns up at the caravan park to tell her a job is going at the head office. They develop a tentative friendship. She visits him at his bedsit and discovers he's cheating his boss. Her job at the waffle bakery is short lived and she finds herself back on the streets. Riquet offers her a job moonlighting at his stand, but she turns him down as she wants 'proper' employment. She ends up blowing the whistle on Riquet's scam.
The waffle boss gives her Riquet's concession. Rosetta sells waffles, while Riquet loiters near by. After work one night, she finds her mother passed out. Rosetta rings the waffle boss to tell him she won't be coming to work any more. She seals up the windows of the caravan and tries to gas herself, but the gas runs out. Rosetta buys another gas canister from the caravan-park owner. On her way back to the caravan, she is confronted by Riquet.
Review
"Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You've found a job. I've found a job. You have a friend. I have a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won't fall into the rut. I won't fall into the rut." So runs the desperate mantra of the Dardenne brothers' extraordinary film, its heroine portrayed heartbreakingly by Emilie Dequenne, her feral roughness masking an inner grace. This dialogue of self and soul marks Rosetta out as a latterday Everywoman seeking survival in post-industrial Belgium. Stripped of her white factory uniform after being made redundant, Rosetta dresses in a jumbled livery of red jacket, thick yellow tights and gumboots. These practical togs make her into a vivid, harlequin figure in the sparse and sombre winter landscape, underscoring her near-medieval existence foraging for sustenance and striving for the armoury of a 'normal life' in a Western Europe gone wild.
Fierce and proud, her tactics are basic, even clumsy. She poaches fish with makeshift equipment, and bargains desperately in second-hand clothes shops. She will do anything, including betray a potential friend - anything but lower herself to begging. So she despises her slumped alcoholic mother, prostituting herself for the price of a beer. The rut Rosetta so fears gapes wide open; the trapper could be trapped herself, perhaps in the thick black river which borders the caravan park. At one point Rosetta and her estranged mum become embroiled in a fight on its borders, and Rosetta ends up in the dank waters, weighed down with a despairing motherlode.
This startlingly palpable expression of Rosetta's physical and emotional hardship is emblematic of the Dardennes' poetic style, one which repeatedly discovers resonance in the commonplace. In scrutinised minutiae the one-time documentarians find transcendental signs, in a way reminiscent of the work of Bresson (particularly Mouchette). Rosetta's struggle is literally embodied in her recurring stomach cramps (presumably period pains) and her wrestling bouts with Riquet, the friend whose job she takes. In the final scene, as she drags the gas bottle back to the caravan so she can finish off her and her mother's lives, the burden of mortality is harrowingly intimated. Such a sense of gravity is emphasised further by the film's restless, handheld camera style, bearing down on the heroine as it follows her, perched almost on her shoulders. Indeed, in the opening factory scene we hardly glimpse Rosetta's face as she ricochets around, angry at her impending fate. The Dardennes thrust us into the defiant rhythm of her long march, evoking the films of Alan Clarke who so often focused on his characters' seemingly endless walking, the tread and dread of a relentless existence.
The starkness is compounded by the film's almost complete lack of music, apart from a scene where Riquet demonstrates his enthusiastic but amateurish drumming (it's the only thing he feels he does "nearly well"). Here, perhaps the film's one upbeat moment, Riquet tries to reach out and offer some warmth to the isolated young woman. It's an emotional connection which offers a mite of hope in the ending when Riquet, albeit unwittingly, interrupts her suicide attempt. But ultimately there is little respite in Rosetta, and that's what makes it a film of such eviscerating emotional intensity.
Credits
- Directors
- Luc Dardenne
- Jean-Pierre Dardenne
- Producers
- Luc Dardenne
- Jean-Pierre Dardenne
- Michèle Pétin
- Laurent Pétin
- Screenplay
- Luc Dardenne
- Jean-Pierre Dardenne
- Director of Photography
- Alain Marcoen
- Editor
- Marie-Hélène Dozo
- Art Director
- Igor Gabriel
- Music
- Jean-Pierre Cocco
- ©Films du Fleuve/ARP Séléction/RTBF (Télévision Belge)
- Production Companies
- Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Michèle & Laurent Pétin present a co-production of Les Films du Fleuve - RTBF (Télévision Belge) and ARP Sélection with the support of Centre du Cinéma et de l'Audiovisuel de la Communauté Française de Belgique/
Télédistributeurs Wallons/Région Wallonne and Loterie Nationale with the participation of Canal+ and Centre National de la Cinématographie - Associate Producer
- Arlette Zylberberg
- Production Managers
- Véronique Marit
- France:
- Patrick Millet
- Unit Production Managers
- Philippe Groff
- Philippe Toussaint
- Unit Managers
- Rüdiger Flörke
- France:
- Didier Hoarau
- Assistant Directors
- Bernard Garant
- Jean-François Tefnin
- Script Supervisors
- Marika Piedboeuf
- France:
- Nathalie Weiss
- Script Consultant
- Léon Michaux
- Camera Operator
- Benoît Dervaux
- Costumes
- Monic Parelle
- Key Make-up
- Tina Kopecka
- Titles
- Arane
- Musicians
- Marc Descamps
- Michel Leclercq
- René Stock
- Ronny Venta
- Soundtrack
- "Something New"
- Sound Engineer
- Jean-Pierre Duret
- Mixer
- Thomas Gauder
- Sound Editors
- Benoît de Clerck
- Luc Plantier
- Aurélie Muller
- Julie Brenta
- Sound Effects
- Philippe van Leer
- Cast
- Emilie Dequenne
- Rosetta
- Fabrizio Rongione
- Riquet
- Anne Yernaux
- Rosetta's mother
- Olivier Gourmet
- boss
- Bernard Marbaix
- camping area guard
- Frédéric Bodson
- personnel chef
- Florian Delain
- boss's son
- Christiane Dorval
- Mireille Bailly
- secondhand shop
sales people - secondhand shop
- Thomas Gollas (Rocky)
- mother's boyfriend
- Léon Michaux
- Victor Marit
- policemen
- Colette Regibeau
- Madame Riga
- Claire Tefnin
- cloakroom girl
- Sophia Leboutte
- woman who is made redundant
- Gaetano Ventura
- shop boss
- Christian Neys
- Valentin Traversi
- Télé Secours men
- Jean-François Noville
- ONEM employee
- Certificate
- 15
Distributor- Artificial Eye Film Company
- 8,470 feet
- 94 minutes 7 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- Subtitles