Rosetta (1999)

Asked about the focus of their cinema, the brothers once noted that when films have a working class subject matter they are labelled "social cinema", whereas films with bourgeois characters are referred to as "psychological dramas". (link)

Few contemporary film directors make movies with such moral depth as Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne. Their understanding of remorse/forgiveness/wrongdoing - but also their committment to depicting social injustice and poverty - is raw and unsentimental, yet very sober & clear-sighted. Rosetta is a case in point. If anybody else tried to make a film like this, it would easily turn into miserabilism and/or social pornography. The Dardennes' feet are nailed to the ground. They focus on things that nobody else cares about. They are not afraid of making political films. Many dislike what they do for that particular reason. To me, what is so admirable about the Dardennes as political film-makers is that they avoid showy resentment. Show/don't tell.

Rosetta lives in a trailer with her mother. They live by a busy roundabout. The roundabout, ironically, is called "Grand canyon". Obviously, Rosetta and her mother are very poor. The mother is an alcoholic. Rosetta tries to find work. In one of the first scenes, we see her being physically dragged out of a factory in which she worked but which won't give her any more work. Not because she did anything wrong. She is no longer needed there. Rosetta fights back. She insists. Two police officers carry her away. Her friend works in a waffle stand. She finds out the guy makes the waffles himself, thereby cheating his employer. Rosetta, desperate to find a job, rats on him. But of course she cannot live with having stolen his job like that, either.

There is almost no frame in this film that Rosetta is not in. The film stalks her around; she runs across a busy street, she runs through the woods, she is chased, she chases somebody else. Rosetta is not only a very bleak movie, its rawness is all over its cinematic technique. The film progesses in restless, anxious movement, of the main character and of the camera. We are not always sure what is going on (oh, she's fishing, that's what). As a matter of fact, most actions are tracked from over Rosetta's shoulder. It's a weird angle to shoot from, but of course there is a point about making the film in that way. There is a conservative dualism that the Dardennes break with. It has to do with how "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are normally put into pictures. Subjectivity is usually the point-of-view shot. We see what the character is defined to see. Objectivity, of course, is conventionally hinted at using long shots ("we see the whole scene"). The Dardennes fucks with these kinds of stereotypes. The peculiar visual style in Rosetta evokes a more complex point of view than crude definitions of subjectivity and objectivity. That everybody talks Bresson in relation to this movie is no surprise. Like Bresson, the Dardennes are interested in a very material dimension of moral reality. (I think that Simone Weil would have appreciated this film*.)

You may complain: but come on! The use of hand-held camera and the way it trades on "authenticity" is just as problematic! I would protest by saying that the point is not to depict the grimmest, waffle-snarfing place on earth and betoken it with Social Reality. The film seems much more ambitious. So where is the "inner life"? Well, it's all there: Rosetta's attempts to land a job is an example of capitalist reality as a psychological maze: a normal life / an unbearable situation / nothing makes sense, you do what you can / it is not the job that matters, but really, it is, or it isn't.

It's hard to describe what makes Rosetta special. Some have claimed it to be a gloomy evocation of social determinism. That interpretation is off, way off. Nor do the Dardennes dapple with something that some older film reviewers would call "European humanism", at least not if that label is to be understood as a elegiac bemourning of the human condition.  One thing that strikes me about their film (those I've seen, that is) is how observantly they register a very everyday sense of surrounding. In Rosetta, it's the roundabout, the myriad paths of the camping spot, drab corridors, the waffle stand. I have a very strong feeling that these things are not there as mood props, just to make it hit home: Rosetta is poor. Rather, by looking at the details of her surroundings, how she moves about there, what she does, what things limits her, we get to understand something about who she is and what kind of life she leads. Not only do Rosetta evoke embodied experience (wrestling on the grass, drinking a glass of water, listening to bad music, to give only three examples), but the film pays a very close attention to the surroundings as lived - and that is why the shabby look of the places hit so hard. I am repeating myself, but let me say it again: the Dardennes' approach is marked by a very un-dualistic tendency.

And that is one of the things I admire them for.

*BTW: Luc Dardenne studied philosophy!