It was Christine Carrère 's first work: an important director was born ,whose filmography includes such remarkable movies such as "qui plume la lune?","darling" (perhaps the most depressive French movie of the naughties") "une mère " (with Mathilde Seignier who starred in this first effort.)
Christine Carrière is a female Kenneth Loach whose closest relatives in the French-speaking cinema are the Dardennes bros (one often thinks of "Rosetta" while watching "Rosine") and Robert Guédiguian .Like all of them, Mrs Carrière shows social concerns and a deep sympathy for the underdogs of a ruthless society.
This director is particularly good at characterization :her unfortunate heroes move in a drab suburb in the north of France her camera catches in minute details: the houses where large families cram, the yards with their clothes lines fluttering in the wind, the jardins ouvriers ( small plots of land rented for gardening) ,the chilly banks of the canal...
An unwed mom,Marie ,lives here with her daughter Rosine.The roles are reversed : Marie, in her head, is still twenty and Rosine is left to her own devices This plight has made her grow in maturity ,she's actually the mother,who takes care of the house,with sparse help from Chantal ,a neighbor.To escapes a doomed living, she takes refuge in music :her dream is to become a singer when she grows up ,and if she goes to church ,it's not to pray the Lord ,but to sing in the chorus (one has understood that long before the long letter the girl sends to the vicar).She's got a friend (a girl) who cannot really comprehend her situation .A dead end.
When the father returns ("don't kid yourself,the neighbor says , he comes back because he's got no house -he lives in a trailer- and no woman'),Rosine is confronted with a man who did not even know after getting Marie pregnant that she had given birth to a baby girl: "Whom are you talking to? " an infuriated father asks "I don't know" the daughter answers .The father in the house only makes the matters worse :he is a lazy selfish man ,who ,on the pretext of teaching her daughter to drive,touches her up and there's worse to come.
Besides ,he is jealous of the " ugly boy" with whom Rosine makes friends :a strawberry mark spoils his looks ,but the director shows the right profile first .
Dead end.
Rosine really got a raw deal :Eloise Charretier is touching ,in a performance devoid of self-pitying and pathos.Matching her every step of the (hard) way is Mathilde Seignier's helpless immature woman who has never been a mother.
Highly recommended .
