ROSETTA

SYNOPSIS:
Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne) lives in a caravan park with her hard drinking mother (Anne Yernaux) and faces a daily battle for a job; she finds one, loses it, finds another, loses it again . . . becoming obsessed by the fear of disappearing and the shame of not belonging. She wants to be normal, with a normal life, amongst normal people.

"I find this an irritating, frustrating film, full of information without meaning, full of action without context. Rosetta is filmed is filmed in relentless close ups so that our view is alsways constricted, incomplete. The same approach in the script leaves us with scraps about Rosetta and her world. For example, she says her mother "only drinks and fucks" but we hardly see her mother at all, and only once do we see her drunk – or so we suppose, as she is being dragged home by Rosetta, unconscious. It is a disjointed film, made even more fractured by the endless use of hand held camera, often so tight that we can’t see what it is Rosetta is doing. The best that can be said of it is that it is an excellent workshop film to study framing and how it affects character in cinema. But even then, the absence of music and the lengthy scenes without dramatic tension are a puzzle. Newcomer Emilie Dequenne is perfectly cast as the rebel without a job, and the filmmakers certainly capture the desperation and isolation of life on the edgy edge of society. Rosetta also displays a certain French contrariness rather well, but as cinema, this is hardly award winning stuff; neither is it spectacularly fresh nor inventive. The 1999 Cannes jury was…well, let’s say very generous."
Andrew L. Urban