Rosetta (1999) dir. Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne
Starring: Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Anne Yernaux, Olivier Gourmet

By Alan Bacchus

Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) is a sad case, living in a trailer park, subject to the whims of her irresponsible mother who prostitutes her body to the superintendant to pay for their heating bills. She has everything working against her. But shining through this cloud of poverty and depression is a fierce determination to succeed. The Dardennes, armed with their handheld camera, follow the impressive Émilie Dequenne around the city with the utmost of urgency, a thrilling journey of body and soul.

Émilie sets her sights on a job at a waffles stand – a meager low-paying job but a legitimate occupation which instills pride in her work. That said, her means of achieving this are dubious. Not unlike how her mother sells herself to their landlord, Rosetta ingratiates herself with her friend, Riquet, who works the stand to convince his boss (Dardennes stalwart Olivier Gourmet) to hire her. The job doesn’t last long when she’s let go in favour of the boss’s son. The result is a magnificent scene for Dequenne, a violent and desperate anger-fueled fit of rage.

Rosetta’s next step is even more dubious, as she rats on her boyfriend for skimming the till and stealing from the boss. It’s a devastating turn of events; a heartless betrayal by Rosetta, the anguish of wish is expressed on the quiet intensity of Dequenne’s remarkable face.

When Rosetta’s mother lapses into alcoholism, thus threatening her life, Rosetta’s priorities are in conflict, forcing her to make some even more powerful life decisions. All the while the Dardennes keep their camera tethered to Dequenne’s shoulder for maximum emotional impact.

Rosetta is the second of the Dardennes' continuing series of Social Realism pictures which target the poverty-stricken urban peoples. After La Promesse and Rosetta, Le Fils and L’Enfant impressively furthered their examination of the impoverished. The thrill of the Dardennes' modus operandi is their ability to laser in on their characters so precisely that we become invested and involved in even the most insignificant of activities in their lives, including Rosetta’s fixation on her makeshift fish-trap, which she’s placed in the river and checks every day. It’s slightly pathetic, but it's an indication of her active desire to do anything, however futile, to be self-determining and self-reliant.

The greatness of the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is the profound nature of scenes like this.

****

Rosetta is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

The Kid with a Bike "Le Gamin au Vélo" (2011) dir. The Dardenne Brothers
Starring Cécile de France, Jérémie Renier, and Thomas Doret

***

By Blair Stewart

Belgium's Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta, The Son and The Child) return to Cannes with their winning cinéma vérité formula. Approaching films with a focus on lower-class European sociology, the Dardennes' storytelling engages you with films of emotional complexity that are told with what initially appears to be docu-drama simplicity.

The Kid with a Bike follows the lousy situation of 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), dumped by his father (Jérémie Renier, a grown-up follow-up to his role in The Child) into foster care. Cyril is a ball of thwarted energy, furiously pecking away at his perceived imprisonment by jumping fences, badgering his councillors and doing anything to burrow back to his absentee pa. He breaks out of the home and runs smack into hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France), who in turn establishes an often fraught relationship with Cyril as she becomes his surrogate mother. The baggage and vulnerability of Cyril is a weighty task for Samantha, with the child's greatest danger coming from a mentorship with an adolescent thug cut from the same cloth as the boy. In the thug, the Dardennes effortlessly sidestep trite judgement of Cyril's bad company with a simple moment involving the thug caring for his invalid grandmother. A moment like that sticks with me, as a dimension is added to a stock character who has his own motivation for why he would commit crimes. The story has a circular purpose to it, with Cyril's behaviour dictated by his father's choices in another pleasant surprise where I'd almost taken the Belgian filmmaking duo for granted with their script.

The Kid with a Bike doesn't break new ground for Jean-Pierre and Luc, but of their major releases over the past two decades, this is their most overtly sympathetic film – it hurts to watch Cyril. Cécile de France is lovely in her working-class role, as she communicates the interior scheming of a good woman nursing a damaged kid. Thomas Doret is a wonderful child actor, his buzzing restlessness reminiscent of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. I thought of Truffaut's film often during the long moments of Cyril riding his bike, urgently trying to gain a step in a hopeless situation.

What's kept me from rating The Kid higher is that with each new film, the Dardenne pair tread closer to old grounds and could certainly expand well beyond their safety net. The film's soundtrack is also periodically breached with an overwrought score yearning for catharsis rather loudly.

While The Kid with a Bike doesn't have the heady morality questions of The Son and its payoff, the Dardennes' latest is a fine film that will reward their audience.