Rosetta (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux
written and directed by Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne


Rosetta1click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer If there were any doubt that the Dardennes
discovered what would be their lasting aesthetic with La promesse, it
was dispelled in the opening moments of Rosetta. The earlier film spent a lot
of time following characters around, hovering behind them
as they made their way through their world. As Rosetta begins, we're
again in close to a character, but this time we have a velocity: The girl,
Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), is storming from room to room in some kind of
industrial facility, and the Dardennes' camera is following her at speed. This isn't a virtuoso tracking shot out of Scorsese or P.T. Anderson, though; Rosetta
isn't accommodating the camera. When she exits a room, she slams the door
behind her and the camera is caught up short, forcing an edit. When she erupts
onto a factory floor, she ducks underneath the machinery, making her own
passageways where the camera cannot go, and again forcing a cut. We are not
welcome to follow.

RUNNING TIME
95 minutes
MPAA
R
ASPECT RATIO(S)
1.66:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
French 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo)
SUBTITLES
English

REGION
A
DISC TYPE
BD-50
STUDIO
Criterion

The sequence's halting, stutter-step rhythm is imposed
by Rosetta herself, and in these first moments it has already filled the film
with tension. When a manager, conspicuous in his long sleeves, pinched face, and a
tie that swings to and fro as he tries to impede her progress, physically
blocks her passage, she ducks under another part of the assembly line to
escape, leaving both the boss man and the cameraman behind. In that moment,
there's the suggestion of equivalence. The attention of audience members in
their arthouse seats or in front of their LCD screens matters no more to
Rosetta than the imprecations of middle management. We are the boss. Rosetta is
on her own.

When Rosetta is finally cornered, a struggle ensues and
the screen blurs, Alain Marcoen's 16mm camera capturing exquisite fragments of
images in a kind of naturalistic analog to Christopher Doyle's smeary, swooshy
action shots for Wong Kar-wai. We clearly see Rosetta spit in her boss's face
and the camera fleetingly registers his reaction (which seems not entirely
unkind, given the circumstances), then stops to dwell on Rosetta's shortness of
breath. The film is dotted with these bursts of conflict, as Rosetta struggles,
physically, with her own body as well as against the bodies of others. These
are perfectly judged moments that inform her character's psychology. Unlike La promesse, which employed fairly conventional, if affecting, narrative
strategies, Rosetta has the unforced power of documentary.

And what sent Rosetta into that rage? Only the loss of
some type of factory job. As usual, the Dardennes' story involves the
consuming necessity of human labour, and, also as usual, it is elegantly
simple, involving only a few important characters–Rosetta herself, the
alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux) with whom she lives in a shabby trailer park
(called, in the movie's greatest ironic gesture, "Grand Canyon"),
waffle-stand counter clerk Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), and the boss
there (Olivier Gourmet). But we spend a large portion of the film's running
time just watching Rosetta. We learn that she's a creature of both routine and
determination, whether she's using a jerry-rigged bait-and-bottle trap to catch
fish in a nearby lake, pouring ingredients into an industrial mixing bowl, or
attempting to drag her mother to substance-abuse treatment. And we learn that
her independent streak, while on some level admirable, has been mutated by the
harshness of her world into a sort of malady. Is that sharp pain near her
stomach merely a menstrual cramp, or a gut reaction to toxic self-reliance?

Rosetta's determination stems from her unshakable
confidence in the baseness of human existence. Her employers will abandon her.
Her mother needs adult supervision, lest she be found drinking up her meagre
savings or blowing the landlord in the little shack where he collects the rent
and controls the running water. Her peers are of no use to her because, to a
one, they lack economic power. That point is made in a scene that most directly
illustrates Rosetta's mindset, in which she refuses to speak to the friendly
waffle clerk but makes a bee-line for the older fellow she sees filling his
till. Her guiding principle? Follow the money.

Critics have described Rosetta as a warrior, and Rosetta is a bit like a wilderness survival
picture set, ironically, in the margins of capitalist civilization. That's a
respectful way to look at her. Other writers have called her "unlikeable," especially drive-by message-board types who see the
presence of uncharming characters as a convenient critical cudgel for beating
up a movie they didn't happen to enjoy. I understand the rap–here's a hungry
girl who throws out fresh fish, a poor girl who declines financial assistance,
a lonely girl who refuses gestures of kindness. When a well-meaning Riquet
appears at the Grand Canyon, she greets him with fists and a scuffle in the
dirt before he can tell her that a waffle-making position has opened up. (The
tussle hikes up her skirt in a way that might be comic or erotic if Rosetta's
lack of self-consciousness weren't so indicative of her grim, almost
frightening single-mindedness.) Later, she accepts his offer of hospitality–some
beer, a pair of old boots, a warm place to stay–only when she can no longer
bear to go home.

But Rosetta's outward unpleasantness cuts to the quick of the picture's examination of character and class. If this girl had been born into the
middle class or higher, the same qualities that make Rosetta
"unlikeable" would be considered hallmarks of a forceful personality.
The pride, the fierce independence, even the willingness to stab another in the
back in order to gain a personal advantage (the assessment might be "she
does what she has to do"), would all be contributory character traits in
the narrative of her success. She would be a go-getter, a bootstrap-puller, a
Republican voter. And if she had the good fortune to be born as a male, she
might go farther still.

Rosetta herself embodies that critique of both classism
and sexism, and it's easy to see it even without digging into the specifics of
Belgian culture and economics that inform her story. (So pointed was the film's
depiction of poverty and stubborn desperation that it has its own namesake
employment legislation, the Rosetta Plan, aimed at improving job opportunities
for young Belgians.) Dequenne's fierce and unsentimental performance is also a
rebuke to the superficial tendencies of mainstream cinema. Imagine the
indignities her character would suffer if transplanted to a Hollywood romcom
and it'll become that much more apparent why the Dardennes take such care never to
idealize or romanticize her portrait.

Too, there is a keen moral dimension to the story that
emerges as Rosetta's transgressions become too much for the hungriest soul to
bear. Terrified by the prospects of continuing poverty and impending
adulthood–in the lines of her mother's face, surely, Rosetta reads her own
grim fortune–she actually contemplates manslaughter, but finds it too bold a
line to cross. She then betrays Riquet, her only friend, by ratting out his
under-the-counter homemade waffle racket, taking his job as her reward. At
that moment where Rosetta sides with management against her fellow proletarian,
she loses the high ground she had maintained for so long. Riquet, gobsmacked,
fills his now-empty days by following Rosetta around town, glaring at her from
his motorbike. As Rosetta starts to struggle with feelings of guilt, the
sputtering whine of Riquet's motorbike becomes an aural manifestation of her
conscience, finally freeing itself from the muck. In certain frames from the movie's final moments, Riquet can literally be seen hovering over Rosetta's
shoulder, an angel or devil riding in slow, baleful circles around her.

What becomes of Rosetta? The film ends too abruptly to
say for sure, but there is hope in that last scene. Rosetta is often
understood as a counterpart to the religious parable offered by Robert
Bresson's similarly themed Mouchette, and if you're looking for a
spiritual dimension in the Dardennes work, it's easy to read Christian
overtones in this story.* Something remarkable certainly does happen in the
film's very last shot. Rosetta, hauling a propane tank back to her
trailer in order to gas herself to death, stumbles and falls. She is weeping
openly. Riquet, her apparent nemesis, likely saves her life when he steps off
of his bike and reaches down to help her up. This last
time we see Rosetta, teary-eyed, her gaze locked with Riquet's off screen, there is something
in her eyes we've never seen before. There is shame there, and humility. There is also, most of all, a measure of disbelief. It reminded me immediately–and, I suppose, unavoidably–of the final moments from Chaplin's City Lights,
a film the Dardennes have identified as one of their favourites. Rosetta
seems to understand that she's been granted a second chance by a
person who still somehow has compassion for her–opening the slammed doors,
following under the machinery, returning again and again to the Grand Canyon.
In those final moments, it's possible that Rosetta knows how a resurrection
feels.

Rosetta3

THE BLU-RAY DISC
There isn't a ton of detail in the Super16mm camera negative, but Criterion's
Blu-ray transfer of Rosetta, sourced from a 35mm blow-up IP scanned at
2K and graded under the supervision of DP Alain Marcoen, seems to preserve
every softly undulating granule. (The video track runs at about 34 Mbps.) The
high resolution and lack of apparent compression artifacts are key, especially
when Marcoen's camera starts swinging back and forth, creating chaos in the
frame. Rosetta's surroundings are generally drab, tending towards grey concrete
and grey-brown earth, and the occasional splashes of colour–the title character's blue and red jackets, for instance, or the green vegetation surrounding the
lake where she hunts trout–are notably subdued. The transfer favours depth over
contrast, with details clearly visible even as the shadows dip gently into the
grainy dark blues at the low end of the image. Black levels are fine
when they need to be, but patches of rich blackness aren't really in the offing. Lastly, even in the darkest parts of the picture, a shimmering veil of 16mm film
grain is a near-constant presence.

Audio is an unfussy 2.0 DTS-HD MA
surround track, but it gets the point across, offering ample dynamic range to
capture all the little sounds that populate Rosetta's environment, including
that damnable sputtering motorbike that so torments her in the late-going. Too, the English subtitles represent a fresh translation. It's the usual outstanding
presentation from Criterion.

Rosetta is very much of a piece with Criterion's
simultaneously-released DVD and Blu of La promesse, the supplements again anchored by a 62-minute, Rosetta-specific excerpt from
what seems to have been a very long interview between critic Scott
Foundas and the Dardennes themselves. Here they discuss Rosetta's theme of
labour and its place in society, noting that they took a lot of shit from the
left for writing a character who flew in the face of Marxist alienation theory.
(Rosetta seems only to be at peace when she is a working, productive member of
society.) They answer the obvious questions, such as the one that gives them an
excuse to tell amusing anecdotes about Dequenne's casting, but they also
take time to explain some of the nitty-gritty work of filmmaking.

At one point,
they describe the unusual lighting scheme that allowed them to shoot inside the
confined interior of Rosetta's trailer, which involved gaffers on
the roof, shining illumination through windows using light fixtures attached to
booms, moving from one corner of the trailer to another as DP Marcoen gave
orders timed to the action in front of the camera. They mention that footage of this choreographed behind-the-scenes effort exists; unfortunately,
none of it has been excavated for presentation here. If Criterion intends to
buff up every single one of its Dardenne titles with excerpts from this lengthy Foundas-Dardennes face-off it's going to start to seem a little
samey-samey (the filmmakers' latest, The Kid with a Bike, is already slated
for a spine number in early 2013), though it's hard to complain too much when the
Dardennes respond openly and generously to the critic's relatively minimal
lines of questioning. It's good work on everyone's part.

It can't compare, however, to the shock of seeing
Émilie Dequenne's face appear, complete with mascara, blush, and lipstick, in
close-up at the beginning of the 18-minute HiDef featurette "An Actors'
Perspective: The Making of the Dardennes' Rosetta". (That strange
s-apostrophe on Actors is Criterion's, not mine.) Here, then, is the
actorly façade the Dardennes broke through to find the scrappy, unadorned
essence that was their Rosetta. Gourmet is back, too, wearing the colourful patterned shirt he sported in the extras on La promesse and
returning to some of the same observations about the concept of an imaginary
life and life history that an actor can use to spark physical expressions of
character. For her part, Dequenne explains that the crew was banned from
rehearsals as the Dardennes and the actors worked out their scenes. Only then
were they invited into the scenes to figure out, on the fly, how they were
being staged. For these guys, classic film-school technique is a relic of your
daddy's movie-making process. "You don't have marks to hit. They don't do
coverage shots," Dequenne explains before adding, with a little laugh, "I
only found about shot/reverse shots later. I had no idea what they were."

Topping off the disc is a French-language
trailer (in HD, and with English subtitles), one of those terse numbers that
runs about a minute in length and doesn't pretend to tell the film's story. The
booklet is filled out by a Kent Jones essay that says a lot about style and
substance in just a few pages.

Rosetta2

*The critic Bert Cardullo enumerated many parallels between Rosetta and Christ in an essay for the Journal of Religion and Film. return

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