Rosetta

Just like La promesse, Rosetta is a portrait of the social underclass of French-speaking Belgium. The film shows the everyday battle to survive in a disconsolate environment where everyone has to fend for themselves. Rosetta, a strong and intense role by newcomer Emilie Dequenne, lives with her alcoholic and aggressive mother in a trailer park and has just been sacked by the bakery. Every day she is out and about making sure they have money and food. Rosetta is hardly a sympathetic character: she keeps quarrelling with everyone, is stubborn and antisocial. She fights her way through life with only one aim: to find work, escape from poverty and build a normal life for herself. She even betrays the only friend she has to get a job.Yet her everyone-for-themselves mentality is not motivated by selfishness, but by an urge to survive. In the end you can only admire her fighting spirit.The style in which the film is shot is equivalent to Rosetta’s recalcitrant and obsessional character: intense, concentrated and physical. The handheld camera sticks to her, is always focused on her in claustrophobic close-ups. Storyline and dialogue are minimal, the locations grey and depressing. More than in La promesse, the realism has a documentary character, so the film creates the suggestion of portraying life in its most pure and rough form.