Rosetta

The filmmaking Brothers Dardenne, Luc & Jean-Pierre, have been around longer than their much-deserved fame. After creating their own production company, Derives, in 1975, they made dozens of documentaries for television and their first feature film - ironically called Falsch - with Bruno Cremer in 1987. But it was not until their third film, La Promesse (1996) that the Dardennes attracted international attention. To date they have made ten films, with an eleventh in production, and every one of them since La Promesse has won awards at international film festivals and inspired intense discussion among cinephiles.

Three years after La Promesse, the Dardennes finally arrived at their fourth film, Rosetta (1999). Intensely anticipated by everyone wanting to see if the brothers could reward the promise of La Promesse, Rosetta was a powerful and quite unsettling portrait of a young girl who has known nothing of winning in her life, who is buffetted from one defeat after another. From the very beginning of Rosetta, the moment she enters the frame, through a door at a factory, wearing a lab coat and a hair net, she is in a hurry. The camera can hardly keep up with her as she makes her way through a bustling factory to confront the person who got her fired her from her job. Whatever their reasons for firing her (and we can infer the reason), she won't accept it. She punches the man who tells her her "trial period" is over and that she has to go. She runs from the police who arrive to remove her. It's a common enough occurrence in every business in every society - the firing of an employee - and a potentially dangerous one, as long as there is no such thing as job security and the nightmare of unemployment hangs over everyone's head.

Rosetta is in a hurry to survive. Living with an alcoholic mother in a trailer park, we don't know whatever hard knocks preceded our introduction to her. All we know is that, as lousy as her life is, she has to fight to keep it from getting lousier. Some of us learn to hope for the best but to prepare for the worst. Rosetta expects the worst. When a young man named Riquet, who works at a waffle stand, arrives at her trailer park to tell her there's a job opening, she attacks him, thinking he got her address from the employment office. He's a decent enough guy, and he gives her a place to sleep and shower after she gives up on her mother for the nth time. But she is so untrusting, so unwilling to believe in anyone's goodwill, even if the goodwill is utterly impersonal, that she returns his friendship with betrayal.

Rosetta's life is such a never-ending disaster that one wonders if she is making it that way - that she is suffering from a mental illness of some kind. Her mother pushes her into a pond and she nearly drowns. Later, when Riquet falls into the same pond, rather than help him out, she runs away. Since no one helped her, she can't help him. It's Life, isn't it, that can't be helped. When she musters enough humanity to save him, and she discovers that he hasn't rejected her as a friend, she turns him in to his boss at the waffle stand, hoping it will help her own chances of replacing him. Riquet wants to know why, and pursues her on his motorbike. At the last, when he doesn't give up circling her on his bike, and she falls, crying, on the ground, he helps her to her feet. She looks at him, defiant to the last. The film abruptly stops there.

In his review of the film, Stanley Kauffmann raised a serious objection:

"The ceaseless fight for survival is in fact the firmest note in the picture. Since Rosetta never stops hating and fighting, no matter what happens, her struggle becomes a harsh tribute to inner strength... But this relatively unvaried tone takes its toll on the film. In La Promesse the spiritual degradation was much the same, even though the boy and his father were comparatively prosperous, but the film moved to some wisp of hope for the boy. Rosetta is trapped, trapped throughout. A closing dash of Technicolor uplift would have been an atrocity. (The change in La Promesse was organic, true.) But the lack of even a catastrophe at the end of Rosetta, let alone uplift, turns the film into a dossier, the chronicle of a case. Once again the Dardennes are, quite obviously, greatly moved by the people with whom they deal, and they present the girl with insistent candor. But this time they have treated their subject as if they were making a documentary; and since it is fiction, their film leaves us with a sense of incompleteness, which La Promesse certainly did not. One wry truth about art is that it needs a little arrangement in order to seem unarranged."

I'm not certain what Kauffmann wanted from Rosetta. The imposition of a design of any kind on the story would've been disastrous. Kauffmann, evidently, saw a kind of redemption in the closing moments of La Promesse that is missing from Rosetta. For reasons that, I think, are entirely spurious, the Dardennes' films are often compared to certain works of Robert Bresson. Rosetta was linked to Mouchette, which was based on a novel by Roman Catholic writer Georges Bernanos. Mouchette is beset with adversities similar to Rosetta's - the brutality or the total indifference of the world around her drive her to a fatal conclusion. And Bresson closes his film, as Mouchette drowns herself, with Monteverdi's Magnificat. The terms of the life that Rosetta must live are equally uncompromising. So how could the film compromise? Her mother pushes her into a pond and she almost drowns, but the thought of drowning herself would never occur to her, despite there being no light at the end of the tunnel that is her life. If there is anything to be learned from the film, it is the vanity of expecting to see a light in the first place.

But there is something more to Kauffmann's point about the "little arrangement" that art is supposed to provide to life, and it goes to the heart of the argument about naturalism in films. Here is Vernon Young, in his analysis of another naturalistic film, Umberto D.

"the film may easily be construed as an artless and unbuttered slice of life, a testimony of naturalism: ostensibly a method of expressing reality without inhibition, without overtones and as far as possible without style. Nothing could be further from the case. Like Shoeshine or Bicycle Thief, and with justification even more subtle, De Sica's Umberto D. - a masterpiece of compassion which he has dedicated to his father - might be termed supernaturalism if this compound had not been preempted for another kind of experience entirely. The fidelity of De Sica's attention to the plight of the man Umberto, realistic in its living details, is enriched by a host of modulations working under and through the story line, so delicately registered as to be imperceptible save to that second awareness evoked from most spectators without their being able to define it."

De Sica's artful resolution to the climax of Umberto D. (the old man distracted from his attempt at suicide by his little dog) satisfies viewers - as much as it's possible to be satisfied. Rosetta is 17, but she is as much beaten by life as Umberto - though she will never admit it. Riquet follows her half out of anger but half out of curiosity as well. Having finally landed a job, she comes home to find her mother passed out drunk on the ground near their trailer. She manages to get her inside and in bed, and then she phones her boss to tell him she won't be coming back to work. Why? Like Riquet, we are baffled by her choices, which always seem to be forced out of her. She strikes out at life before it can strike her. Watching her grapple so desperately but indefatigably with her life is a terrifying rebuke of all of our welfare states with their safety nets that are supposed to catch the ones among us who just can't manage to make it, no matter how hard they try. It is its portrait of Rosetta's strength, her ability to get knocked down and get back up again time after time, that is the film's great achievement.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, "Two Teenage Girls," The New Republic, November 29, 1999.
(2) Vernon Young, "Umberto D.: Vittorio De Sica's Super-naturalism," The Hudson Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4 [Winter, 1956].