Rosetta

Rosetta is an adolescent who finds herself out of work at the beginning of this film. She lives with her mother in a trailer in the middle of an anonymous European city; in previous generations she would have been a member of a working class community which would have at least tempered some of the alienation and hardship associated with poverty. But in the globalised free market at the end of the century, Rosetta has to fend for herself and her survival depends much more on selfishness than it does on comradeship: the competition of the market effects every minutiae of her life. This shattering film is uncompromising in its depiction of the “new” urban poor, refusing to allow sentimentality or romance to compromise the ambiguities and complexities of its central character. Infused with a sparse aesthetic - natural sound, no musical soundtrack, handheld camera - the film dispassionately follows Rosetta as she attempts to find any avenue she can to get a job, to make a pittance, to survive. The young actress Emilie Dequenne had not acted for the camera before, and her startlingly effective performance won her the Palme d’Or at Cannes. By eschewing safe choices, by reaffirming the political and aesthetic commitments of realist and humanist filmmaking, and by presenting the culture of the underclass in economic terms not as a “lifestyle” (as Hollywood is prone to do), the Dardenne brothers have made the pivotal film about contemporary class relations. Winner of the Palme d’Or in 1999, “Rosetta” created such a controversy that the Belgium government was forced to change industrial relations legislation that penalised young workers (such as Rosetta). That fact alone speaks volumes about the integrity and power of this film. In French with English subtitles. The production notes are available as a separate loan item.