Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (1999)
The dizzying, nearly relentless handheld camera in Rosetta ‘recalls the late television work of Alan Clarke: Road, Christine, Made in Britain. And like Clarke’s truculent heroines, Rosetta is a girl driven to desperate measures for whom one can’t help but feel a terrible sympathy’. Richard Kelly’s comparison in Sight and Sound (February 2000) is apt enough but the young title character’s plight in the Dardenne brothers’ fourth feature also brings to mind a different landmark in 1980s British television drama, Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff. Instead of Liverpool, the setting here is, as usual for the Dardennes, Seraing in the Belgian province of Liège – their home city. But their heroine is asking for much the same thing as Yosser Hughes: ‘Gizza job’ or, more specifically, secure employment.
The film starts with Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) violently refusing to leave the factory where she recently completed a probationary period competently but has now been told she’s redundant. She’s eventually ejected and returns home to the out-of-town caravan park – its misnomer is ‘Grand Canyon’ – where she lives with her alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux). When she’s sober enough, the mother mends secondhand clothes for Rosetta to sell to charity shops. She also gets cash from men who pay her for sex; her drinking and promiscuity make for a running battle with her daughter. Seventeen-year-old Rosetta isn’t eligible for unemployment pay and refuses to receive welfare support. She goes round town asking for work, including at a waffles bakery. The owner (Olivier Gourmet) has no vacancies but agrees to keep her in mind if things change. She also exchanges a few words with twenty-something Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), who works on a waffles stand in the street. Soon after, he turns up at Grand Canyon on his moped to report that one of the outfit’s other staff has been fired.
Rosetta returns to the bakery, persuades the boss to take her on and quickly gets the hang of things. Efforts to persuade her mother to visit a rehab clinic are less successful: in a physical struggle between them, Rosetta falls into the river that runs alongside the caravan park. Instead or returning home, she goes to Riquet’s bedsit, where they eat and drink together, and she stays the night on a couch. Before going to sleep, she has a conversation with herself:
‘Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You found a job. I found a job. You’ve got a friend. I’ve got a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won’t fall in the rut. I won’t fall in the rut. Goodnight. Goodnight.’
Next morning she arrives at the bakery to bad news. The boss is letting her go, in favour of his son who has failed school exams and needs to get working immediately.
I must have first seen Rosetta in the mid-noughties – in the days, that is, when I found the Dardennes’ films harder to get on with than I do now. It was time to revisit their first Cannes Palme d’Or winner and I got much more out of it on this second viewing. The prevailing grimness is certainly oppressive but it isn’t the misery blanket I felt it was the first time around. The Dardennes dramatise an urgent socio-economic situation by making what they described at Cannes as a ‘war film’. Expanding on this in the S&S interview with Richard Kelly, they refer to Rosetta’s mother as ‘a casualty, confined to camp’ and the noisy motorway that divides Grand Canyon from the town as a ‘frontier’. The film deplores capitalism but its polemical nature doesn’t reduce the people in it to expressions of an uncompromising political agenda. It’s likely that if this were a Ken Loach piece, for example, the man who runs the waffles business would be presented only as part of the system Rosetta is up against; the Dardennes portray him, rather, as harassed and conflicted. He’s not unwilling to give Rosetta a leg up and appreciates that she’s good at the bakery job. He also needs to balance the books and do the best for his son.
Rosetta’s behaviour can’t fail to be affected by her circumstances but she’s an increasingly intriguing character. She’s desperate to get a foothold in a society that’s, in effect, alienating and inimical to her. But she’s averse to engaging with people, except in order to get, carry out and hold onto paid work. Although the whispered mantra quoted above may seem key to the film, it’s not at all typical of it. Rosetta is mostly troubled by Riquet’s friendship. She’s startled when he first arrives at Grand Canyon with the news about the vacant job: he has invaded her shameful territory. When she goes to his place the tempo changes and the camerawork calms down but Rosetta, even though she’s found a kind of refuge, is uneasy It’s Riquet who does nearly all the talking. We get bits of his backstory – he was once a provincial gymnastics champion, he’s learning to play the drums – but none of Rosetta’s.
She repeatedly accepts his offers of French toast and beer but literally keeps her head down, anxious to minimise eye contact. Riquet asks her to dance to the drum track he’s recorded and she reluctantly agrees but she soon breaks away, doubled up with the period cramps we already know she suffers from. (We saw her lying on her bed at home, using a hairdryer to warm her tummy and alleviate the pain.) It’s shocking when Rosetta falls into the river, is sucked down by the mud and yells in vain for her mother to help: the mother runs away, leaving Rosetta to struggle free alone. In a later scene, Riquet comes back to the caravan park to find Rosetta laying out rudimentary fish traps to catch trout for food. Trying to help her, he too capsizes in the river and struggles, terrified, in the mud. Rosetta also turns away. It’s only after some thought that she decides to yank off a tree branch and offer it to him to catch hold of.
Riquet has already revealed to her that he’s been cheating the boss from day one. It’s when Rosetta fails to find another job that she learns the extent of Riquet’s deception: he’s stealing supplies to make and sell his own waffles, and invites Rosetta to join him in the business. Instead, she reports him to the boss, who promptly throws Riquet off the stand. This is how Rosetta gets back to earning a wage. She also gets Riquet’s apron, with her name embroidered on it instead of his, and she makes a good job of running the stall, though she avoids eye contact with Riquet even more determinedly than before when he turns up in the waffles queue.
BFI was showing Rosetta in its recurring ‘Big Screen Classics’ strand but this month’s selection of classic films is designed to acknowledge the wide-ranging influence of Robert Bresson, the subject of a separate, concurrent retrospective. The Dardennes have in common with Bresson, as well as an austerity of style, a liking for using non-professional actors. That was the case with Émilie Dequenne, when she was cast in Rosetta though it’s hardly surprising she’s gone on from it to a successful professional career. As the Dardennes told Richard Kelly, ‘… we had to find an unknown … you can believe in Rosetta because you’re not seeing a girl who was this other character in that other movie’. (This is true – and one’s all the more grateful for it seeing Rosetta immediately after Judgment at Nuremberg!) Dequenne (who shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes) is truly remarkable: as well as immersing herself in a physically demanding role, she’s able to be emotionally raw even while Rosetta is closed off. She’s excellently supported by Olivier Gourmet and by Fabrizio Rongione as the edgy, eager Riquet.
After Rosetta locks up the waffles van for the day, Riquet follows her on his moped and, when he catches up, grabs hold of her, demanding to know why she shopped him and lost him his job. She truthfully answers that she wanted it for herself, adding that, when he fell in the river, ‘I didn’t want you out’. Before letting her go, he shouts back, ‘You helped me anyway!’ This unexpected reply anticipates the film’s conclusion, which is powerfully unsentimental but not devoid of hope. Back in Grand Canyon, Rosetta finds her mother drunk and practically unconscious outside their caravan. She drags her on and puts her to bed. Rosetta then hard boils an egg, goes out to a payphone to tell the boss she won’t be coming back to work, seals the entrances to the caravan, and turns on the gas. She eats her egg and lies down on her bed. The gas runs out before it can do its work. She gets up and goes to the caravan park manager (Bernard Marbaix) to buy a new gas canister, which she starts to lug back with effort and in great distress. She’s conscious of a whining sound, getting louder and which she and we instantly recognise. Riquet’s moped has always been a high-volume droning insect; in the later stages, as he continues to pursue Rosetta, its noise is increasingly insistent. At its most menacing in this closing scene, it also signifies, in a more positive sense, that Riquet won’t go away. He and the vehicle circle Rosetta, who collapses to the ground weeping. Riquet gets off his moped to help and hold her up. She finally looks him in the face.
22 June 2022
