Movie Recommendation- Rosetta
ROSETTA (1999)
Rosetta was the not the first film the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc) made but it was the first one I saw and, as such, it was my introduction to what I’ve come to understand as one of the most distinct auteur voices in cinema today. Much like Mike Leigh’s England, the Dardennes give us an almost exclusively lower class view of Belgium. Beyond that characteristic, though, the Dardennes’ films all share a conspicuous mode of presentation. The camera, though often handheld and jittery, moves in tandem with the movies’ leads for almost the entirety of the run time. That it often does so in medium close-up forces us to consider not the world the characters inhabit but the way they process that world and how it effects them. If such a thing is possible, the Dardennes are aggressively humanistic. The plot of Rosetta can be summed up by saying it’s a movie where a teenager looks for a job for an hour and a half. The experience of it is so much more than that. And for that true taste of Belgium, there are so many waffles in this film that they might as well receive second billing behind the captivating Émilie Dequenne.