Just a Cannes Job?

Ever since Rosetta won the top prize at this year's Cannes festival, American journalists have puzzled over the jury's decision, or written it off as mere insolence. To hear them tell it, the film is so slight as to flirt with nonexistence. There are no stars and no big actorly turns, no amusing settings and no enviable clothes, no songs, no suspense, no excitement, no romance--nothing but an angry and impoverished 18-year-old girl, living in a trailer park outside some Belgian town that looks as if it were all poured from the same cement mixer.

This description is accurate in fact; but it is not truthful. It doesn't tell you that Rosetta is both subtle and stunningly direct; that its narrow focus is more like a stare, at once penetrating and compassionate; that suspense, excitement, romance and even music animate the picture--though an audience habituated to American movies might not notice these qualities without first purging itself. A painless procedure: Simply abandon the things you think you know; stop busying yourself with emotions you think you should feel. Open your eyes, ears and mind to Rosetta, and discover how full this movie can be.

At the film's center--and its periphery, too, since she occupies every frame--is the title character, played by Emilie Dequenne, who shared the prize for best actress at Cannes. Before Rosetta, she had not appeared in front of a camera; she performed as if she believed, once the filming stopped, she would no longer exist at all. From the opening scene onward, Dequenne seems to hurl herself against the world, which is as much of a strategy as the character herself can manage.

We first see her from behind, without knowing why she's stomping and panting her way down a corridor. The camera, which is handheld throughout the movie, chases after Rosetta, scarcely able to keep up with her fury. Suddenly, in a blur of action, she is in a shouting match. She has completed a training program at a factory, only to be told there are no jobs--and now, in desperation, she not only refuses to leave the premises but assaults the personnel manager.

So much for introductions. It's only when she's been peeled off her opponent and is outside again, riding the bus toward home, that we get a clear view of Rosetta. She has the sort of broad, flat face that runs down in straight lines from hairline to jaw, then slants in abruptly to a square little chin--features that are left harshly unframed, since her dark hair is sheared no more carefully than a dog's. Her costume--a zippered sweatshirt, a jacket with red and black stripes, a short skirt that looks too flimsy for the weather--leaves her looking short and chunky. You can believe this young woman subsists on waffles and French toast.

In the washed-out light that predominates in Rosetta, these brute facts strike the eye bluntly. And yet half the action is invisible. You observe the minute details of Rosetta's routine--the way she hides her town shoes in an out-of-use drainpipe, the way she sneaks into the trailer park from the rear, through the woods--but the reasons for these actions never rise to the surface. That's the subtlety of Rosetta: The film is as reticent as its protagonist, who refuses to let people see her enter the trailer park and won't expose her precious shoes in that place.

The shoes are her tokens of "a normal life," the name she puts on the seemingly unattainable ideal of a job, a fixed home, a friend. Without them, Rosetta lives between shame and rage: shame that she strenuously conceals in the face of "normal" people, rage that explodes when anyone penetrates her mask. Watch what happens when Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), a very casual acquaintance from town, follows her to the trailer park on his motorbike. Rosetta launches herself at him and has to be wrestled into submission in the mud--and all the poor guy wanted was to direct her toward a job, and maybe ask for a date.

Dates are a delicate issue for Rosetta. She suffers from chronic cramps, which she treats by warming her belly with a hair dryer. Maybe the problem is all that rage and shame; or maybe it's her mother, who likes to get drunk and screw. No matter that those are among the favorite pastimes of normal people. Sex and booze are dangerous luxuries to Rosetta, who eats her own gut trying to keep Mom in line. Still, when Riquet sets her up with a job, she consents to visit his apartment.

The film, which has been moving headlong, slows down for the first time, as Rosetta allows herself to sit at Riquet's table. She eats the starchy meal he serves. She listens to his music. Abruptly, unexpectedly, she accepts a beer and downs it in one gulp. Romance, song, suspense: Have they ever been felt more intensely in a movie than they are here, in this narrow, smoky room, with people who are so awkward, inarticulate and touching?

"Your name is Rosetta," she says to herself later, lying in darkness, and answers, "My name is Rosetta. You have a job. I have a job. You have a normal life. I have a normal life." As the camera hangs above her, you watch this young woman trying to become the self she hopes for; and though the actress is still and the image still, something trembles in the scene. It's the movement of your thoughts and feelings.

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