Rosetta: The Dardenne brothers well deserved the Palme d’Or in 1999
Emilie Dequenne is unforgettable in this drama inspired by K, the hero of the Château de Kafka.
In 1999, the big winners of the Cannes Film Festival were Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, who won the Palme d’Or for Rosettato review this evening on France 4. A work that was not a favorite: at the time, everyone thought that Pedro Almodovar would win this award for another drama, Everything about my mother (which will be scheduled for Friday, May 26 on France 5). But David Cronenberg’s jury finally preferred to honor the girl’s journey with precarious life, embodied by Emilie Dequenne. At only 18, she was perfect in this role of strong woman, ready to do anything to get out of it. The evening when the two directors were honored, she also won the female interpretation prize. A double victory, which was followed in 2006 of a new palm of gold, for the duo, this time for The child.
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At the time, Fluctuatepartner cultural site ofe firsthad been swept away by Rosettaand detailed in a long criticism why this film deserved to receive the main prize of the Cannes Film Festival. We set off again below.
Rosetta galley. Barely out of adolescence, she squat in a caravan open to all winds, in a motorway campsite. Her alcoholic mother for the only partner, she gets up every morning to fight a titanic fight against the ordinary world.
You have to eat, wash, find work. Each act becomes complicated, everything is violence. Rosetta is strong with desperate energy, that of the drowned man who continues to fight when all hope seems lost.
In an apocalyptic Belgium, gigantic fallow and humid wasteland, Rosetta clings to what she can: a job at the factory, a small business from old clothes, an egg with a hull. In a world that does not want her, her efforts become pathetic, the Dardenne brothers wanted it as follows: “We thought of the character of K, in The castle From Kafka, who cannot access the castle, which is always refused in the village, who wonders if he really exists. It put us on the idea of a girl who is put outside, who wants to obtain something that would allow her to get into society, and who is all the time given outside ”.
As in the saddest lives, the film is not really based on a scenario, but rather on the chain of situations where the desire to survive in hostile environment dominates. The repetitiveness of the gestures testifies to the gravity of the approaches imposed on the heroine. The Dardenne brothers film it several times when she removes her shoes and puts her boots to reach her caravan. When thoughts are entirely built around these derisory actions, how to project themselves, in the literal sense, in the future? There is only a gloomy present, always started again, a kind of unnecessary and cyclical agitation in the land of misery.
“We had decided not to start from an intrigue, but from a person. Contrary to The promisewe wanted to build the scenario according to the things that happen. The spectator had to be put in the position he wonders: “What’s going to happen to her? How will she manage with what happens to her?” It was up to us to find a new way of writing in this sense, without building. »»
Anna Arendt, in her analysis of concentrational systems, showed that all men are equal in horror, the death camps having abolished the difference between the executioners and the victims. All things considered, Rosetta applies this psychological and dramatic scheme. Ready to be kapo of the system that suffocates her, she will go so far as to betray her only friend. The artistic courage of the Dardenne brothers is reflected in this desire to break Manichaeism which stifles cinematographic creation.
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