Rosetta
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
All of this is a roundabout way of underscoring my point that it’s silly for the mainstream American press to go on assuming that foreign movies are neither relevant to American audiences nor important. Rosetta, a Belgian film that’s starting its second and final week at the Music Box, won the top prize at Cannes, the world’s top film festival, and its 18-year-old lead, Emilie Dequenne, shared the best-actress award. Its story, subject, and heroine are probably more relevant to the lives of most Americans–and have more physical presence and pack a bigger emotional punch–than the story, subject, and characters of most current Hollywood films. Nevertheless, most American critics have refused to give this current American release even a fraction of the attention they lavish on any American movie.
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From its opening seconds, Rosetta makes it clear that its heroine is angry–before it tells us who she is or what she’s angry about. Alain Marcoen’s virtuoso handheld camera, which will stay close to her throughout the film, follows as she slams a door, strides through the industrial workplace where she’s just been laid off for obscure reasons, and then assaults her boss when he insists that she leave. After taking the bus back to the trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother, Rosetta stops briefly in the woods and methodically takes off her shoes and puts on a pair of boots hidden behind a large rock in a drainpipe. This ritual is repeated throughout the film, marking the transition between her work and her even more solitary home life, where most of her time is spent keeping her mother away from booze and sex (her mother’s principal method of acquiring booze), fishing in a nearby muddy creek, and soothing her stomach pains, usually by warming her belly with a hair dryer.
These stories are edgy in part because the Dardennes never seem to know more about their characters than they show. The moments at which La promesse and Rosetta end appear to be precisely the moments at which the filmmakers choose to stop imagining what comes next. Yet it’s fascinating that it’s impossible to guess what Igor will do or say five seconds after La promesse ends, and the same thing is true of Rosetta at the end of Rosetta. Some might consider this a limitation, particularly given the depths of the characterizations found in, for instance, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. But I regard it as a strength that the Dardennes’ instinct for fiction closely parallels their instinct for documentary and that they refuse to claim more knowledge of their characters than they’re ready to impart. Their work with Dequenne suggests that she operates the same way, with the same tight focus; interviews with the three of them have revealed that they have somewhat different interpretations of portions of the story that were deliberately left in the dark: the identity of Rosetta’s father, the source of her stomach pains, the significance of the final scene.
I don’t think it’s possible to misread Rosetta in any of the ways outlined by Arendt, so perhaps I’m misreading the film critic. Clearly Rosetta isn’t esoteric or cerebral or difficult to understand; it isn’t remotely boring or even slightly pretentious. Its only crimes are that it isn’t in English (though it doesn’t have much dialogue anyway), it has something powerful to say about what’s happening right now across the planet, and millions haven’t been spent promoting it.
