Rosetta/La Promesse [DVD] [2000]

The story line is very basic; Rosetta, a girl in her late teens, lives with her alcoholic mother in a permanent caravan park outside a largish industrial Belgian town. As her mother is incapable for most of the time, it has fallen on Rosetta to provide for the two of them as best as she can. Rosetta refuses to sink into the same mire as her mother who is still flirting with prostitution as a means of survival, and desperately wants to find a 'normal' job, however mundane, to furnish an existence that most people take for granted. The film centres on Rosetta's brushes with employment and her fury at various bosses who sack her when they find out her background and the domestic scenes with her mother whom she variously cares for, hates and literally picks up from the floor. The only hope is a local young man who develops some sort of feelings for her, though even this is compromised when she betrays him to steal his job.

The directors have used various methods to depict this. There is the strong flavour of independent cinema and repetition techniques - it is a mighty long way from Hollywood; some scenes are reminiscent of French 'relationship' movies like Betty Blue; others recall traditions of British realism; and then there is the hand held camera.

The repetition is not boring, but lyrical; the 'relationship' if it can be called that is extremely tenuous, so that the one time Rosetta smiles it stands out like an explosion; the realism makes some of Ken Loach's work seem more like Emmerdale (a British soap); the hand held camera makes you giddy, but follows Rosetta so closely, so intimately in all her brave gravity, that you sometimes can't bear it. It would be impossible to see this film and not be amazed by the performance of Emilie Dequenne, so convincingly is she inside the skin of her directors' creation.

Don't buy this if you only like conventional cinema, but do buy it if you like a challenge!

I first encountered the Dardenne’s work back in 2001, when British film channel Film Four premiered their 1996 debut work The Promise, in preparation for the acclaimed follow up Rosetta. Both films are heavily indebted to Loach, particularly his films Raining Stones, Riff Raff and surprisingly, the then-un-produced My Name is Joe... with the filmmakers presenting the viewer with a series of characters continually forced to the brink of despair, but desperate to pull them-selves back. Of the two films collected on this disk, The Promise is the one that makes the greatest impact. The Dardenne’s here create a world that isn’t a million-miles away from the current social climate in the UK, with building sites, smoky pubs and migrant workers peppering what is essentially the typical rites-of-passage/coming of age movie so loved by Hollywood. The brothers rest their narrative firmly on the shoulders of young newcomer Jérémie Rénier as Igor, a young tear-away forced into looking after a young black mother and her baby following the death of the woman’s husband whilst working for the company run by Igor’s father...

The brothers season the film with lots of moralistic issues such as the passage into adulthood, immigration, and domestic abuse, whilst at the centre of it all, featuring a touching father son relationship between Igor and his disparate dad (played here by award winning actor and regular Dardenne collaborator Olivier Gourmet). The second film, and the one that garnered the most attention when first shown at the Cannes film festival back in 1999 is Rosetta, a less successful continuation of the themes of La Promesse, featuring the brilliant Emilie Dequenne as a troubled young teenager desperately searching the Belgium ghettos for work, whilst also having to put up with an alcoholic mother, a lecherous landlord and a series of ignorant civil servants. The use of handheld cameras and jarring jump-cuts is greater this time around with the brothers seemingly intent on alienating the viewer, but also, expressionistically conveying the lead protagonist’s sense of cultural dislocation and alienation from the world around her...

As that final paragraph might suggest, Rosetta is a bleak, bleak film, prefiguring the likes of Dancer in the Dark or Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing... However, unlike those films, the Dardenne’s are unable to overcome the clichés of the narrative, and, instead of offering us a searing indictment, or protests against the mass-unemployment of provincial France and Belgium, simply end up re-hashing a million and one kitchen sink films from the decades before. At this price, this double disk set might prove a little too steep for viewers and, unlike the Promise, Rosetta is hardly required viewing. My advice would be, to try and pick up one or the other film separately, or failing that, if you already know and love Rosetta, then The Promise should not be a disappointment. At any rate, though the scenarios and some of the characterisations might, for lack of a better word, be seen a clichéd, the intensity of the performances and technical skill from all the actors, weather professional or not, is outstanding.

The visual style and way we share the repetitive mundanity of much of Rosetta's life means that the audience is able to appreciate the significance of the unspectacular events which eventually lead to her cracking.