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Rosetta

1999

Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux ...

7.0

5,688

Drama Seventeen-year-old Rosetta lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother and wants nothing more out of life than the simple dignity of a job. She becomes so desperate for work that she betrays the young man, Riquet, who befriended her, so that she can assume his job at a waffle stand. The film's look is distinctive, featuring close-in shots with a hand-held camera that visual reflect Rosetta's emotional instability.

	Author	Review
United States	A.A. Dowd AV Club	"In terms of both its cinematic and societal impact, 'Rosetta' may be the Dardennes’ most important work."	POS
United States	Stephen Holden The New York Times	"[It] is so clinically detached from its subject and its screenplay so minimal that we never really feel the title character's intense suffering (...) Instead of feeling universal, the movie feels claustrophobic."	NEG
United States	Derek Elley Variety	"Pic undoubtedly has some powerful moments (...) But the setting of the movie (...) and the antsy visual style (...) will turn off many viewers"	NEU
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"You feel it in your nervous system before you get a chance to reflect on its meaning (...) It makes just about every other form of movie 'realism' look like trivial escapism."	POS
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"A work of integrity with a forceful central performance but rather limited (...) The Dardenne brothers tell us little about the larger social context in which [the protagonist] exists"	NEU
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"The film has an odd subterranean power (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Glenn Heath Jr. Slant	"What makes 'Rosetta' unique, though, is its lead character’s determination to reveal and destroy any hint of surrounding weakness threatening to subvert her singular direction in life (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5)"	POS

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