Winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, this subtle look at the demoralizing effects of poverty is subtle and well-crafted.
Rosetta (Emile Dequenne, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY) is a young woman, who becomes distraught when she is fired from her new job. She lives in a trailer and supports her alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux). Over the course of the film, she develops a friendship with a young man named Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione, 2006’s THE CHILD), who works at a waffle stand. The film chronicles the hardships of Rosetta’s life and the extents that poverty drives her.
Director/writers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (THE SON) have a simple causal style, which just allows the action to slowly and subtly unfold to the audience. Amazingly their films rely on little dialogue, using imagery to tell the story. The complexity of the imagery is remarkable. In one shot, this film can tell you so much about the characters that lesser films need paragraphs of dialogue to explain. They never go for effect or heighten the drama with flashy camera work and editing.
For an audience accustomed to the fast-paced Hollywood style, this film might seem painfully slow, but if you give it a chance and pay attention the narrative sucks one in and brings us closer to the characters in a less manipulative way than your typical drama. All the performances are completely natural. The heartbreaking irony of where the story goes is powerful. The Dardenne brothers are interested in looking at painful truths that we as humans try not to address. We might not want to think we’d do what the characters do here, but the film puts us in their shoes and makes us understand clearly their perspective. This is cinema striped of artifice and is confident enough to allow its audience to make up its own mind about what is going on without spelling things out. The best way to describe the film is to say it was made for adults.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
