Rosetta

I’d been anticipating a dvd of this Cannes Palme d’Or winner for years, when it surprisingly turned up on HBO Signature. It’s a magnetic portrait of a teenage girl trying to stay afloat in a world of shit, but would be relentless to watch for any but the most confirmed of bleeding hearts. If movies mean entertainment for you, then look elsewhere. It’s an up-close and in-your-face depiction of a feisty, almost feral, Belgian girl struggling to survive with an alcoholic mother in a trailer park caravan without running water, desperately yearning to be employed but frustrated at every turn, even in a grimly comic attempt at suicide. Her obsessive routines are never explained but you get the drift after some repetition, e.g. she hides a pair of rubber boots in a culvert so she can change out of her “work” shoes before wading into the cesspool of her homelife. Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes made the equally grim and powerful La Promesse and Le Fils, also about marginal lives on the dark edge of European life. Here they are aided immeasurably by the punk luminescence of the title character, played by Emilie Dequenne, lovely but tough, whose face fills nearly every frame of the film. She may be that character in real life, like Bresson’s Mouchette, or she may be an actress like Sandrine Bonnaire, to go on from Vagabond into screen stardom. I, for one, would like to see more of her. (1999, HBO/T, n.) *7* (MC-76, RT-84.)