February 24–March 2, 2000

movie shorts

Rosetta

This very disappointing follow-up to La Promesse finds Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne wallowing in misery to the exclusion of all else. Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne) is a young woman who lives (sometimes) in a trailer with her alcoholic mother, and in the course of the film, she bounces through a series of menial jobs, sometimes being fired, sometimes self-destructively quitting or provoking her own dismissal. Unlike, say, My Name is Joe, where the main character’s downward spiral was clearly provoked by an uncaring government and his own personal demons, Rosetta’s self-destruction seems not just wanton, but arbitrary, less a production of her own capriciousness than the filmmakers’. Rosetta has that old air of patronizing neorealist desperation, as if its determined to shove your nose in the truth — the flaw being that you can’t see anything when it’s pressed up against your face. In a way, it’s not surprising that the film took Palme d’Or and Best Actress honors at Cannes, since this is exactly the sort of ponderous eat-your-vegetables stuff European juries love to reward. But while sitting through Rosetta may make you feel virtuous — it certainly is an ordeal — it won’t engender any kind of real thought, or force anyone to reconsider the proposition that poor people are that way because they want to be.

—Sam Adams