Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8356 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-04-16
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Dubbed, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: French, Romanian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 180 minutes

Special Features
16:9 Wide Screen
Italian
French
Region 2
Dolby Digital 2.0 French Italian
Dolby Digital 2.0
Award Ceremony Footage
Cast Biographies
Director Biographies And Filmographies
Interview With Luc And Jean Pierre Dardenne
Stills Gallery
Theatrical Trailer
Dutch\English\Italian

Synopsis
A gruelling, powerful film that features Emilie Dequenne in her screen debut. She portrays Rosetta, a 17-year-old girl who wants nothing more than to work for a living. After being fired from her most recent job, she spends her subsequent days trying to procure work anywhere possible. Eventually, she befriends Riquet, a waffle seller, and backstabs him in order to accomplish her goal. Dequenne is up to the challenge as the focal point of every screen second, delivering a highly charged, impassioned performance. ROSETTA is another gritty work of socio-realism from the Dardenne's, whose LA PROMESSE introduced them to the world of fictional feature filmmaking--where they emigrated from documentaries.

From the Back Cover
"Rosetta" - Winner of the 1999 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and widely hailed as a masterpiece, 'Rosetta' is an extraordinary portrait of a resourceful teenage girl struggling to find her way in a tough world. Written and directed with great skill and energy by writer/director brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, the film stars newcomer Emilie Dequenne, who won the Cannes Best Actress award for her outstanding realisation of this title role

"La Promesse" - Made three years earlier, 'La Promesse' is the story of 15 year old Igor, who helps his small time crook father run a scam illegally employing immigrants on building sites. But when one of the workers is fatally injured, Igor promises to look after the man's wife and child - a promise that changes Igor's life forever

Customer Reviews

Thoughts on Rosetta
My first reaction at the end of this film was that I'd seen something remarkable, and several years later, after some reflection, I still think so.

The story line is very basic; Rosetta, a girl in her late teens, lives with her alcoholic mother in a permanent caravan park outside a largish industrial Belgian town. As her mother is incapable for most of the time, it has fallen on Rosetta to provide for the two of them as best as she can. Rosetta refuses to sink into the same mire as her mother who is still flirting with prostitution as a means of survival, and desperately wants to find a 'normal' job, however mundane, to furnish an existence that most people take for granted. The film centres on Rosetta's brushes with employment and her fury at various bosses who sack her when they find out her background and the domestic scenes with her mother whom she variously cares for, hates and literally picks up from the floor. The only hope is a local young man who develops some sort of feelings for her, though even this is compromised when she betrays him to steal his job.

The directors have used various methods to depict this. There is the strong flavour of independent cinema and repetition techniques - it is a mighty long way from Hollywood; some scenes are reminiscent of French 'relationship' movies like Betty Blue; others recall traditions of British realism; and then there is the hand held camera.

The repetition is not boring, but lyrical; the 'relationship' if it can be called that is extremely tenuous, so that the one time Rosetta smiles it stands out like an explosion; the realism makes some of Ken Loach's work seem more like Emmerdale (a British soap); the hand held camera makes you giddy, but follows Rosetta so closely, so intimately in all her brave gravity, that you sometimes can't bear it. It would be impossible to see this film and not be amazed by the performance of Emilie Dequenne, so convincingly is she inside the skin of her directors' creation.

Don't buy this if you only like conventional cinema, but do buy it if you like a challenge!

A Double slice of Belgian social-realism...
Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne concern themselves with creating films that put realism on the screen without using artifice or cinematic trickery to distract the audience from the socially aware message at the core of their narratives. Unlike the dogme movement, or the works of Lars von Trier etc, the Dardenne brothers are unconcerned with changing the face of cinematic reality but rather, take their cue from people like Ken Loach... by creating honest, often-bleak works of film that take their character from despair, to hope, and sometimes, right back to despair, in order to give the audience a taste of the world away from DVD players, film magazines, and art-house cinemas. The concept is hypocritical admittedly, and, although the heavy-handed-ness of the brother’s work does occasionally become preachy, there is ample opportunity to deliver some moments of earth-shattering drama.

I first encountered the Dardenne’s work back in 2001, when British film channel Film Four premiered their 1996 debut work The Promise, in preparation for the acclaimed follow up Rosetta. Both films are heavily indebted to Loach, particularly his films Raining Stones, Riff Raff and surprisingly, the then-un-produced My Name is Joe... with the filmmakers presenting the viewer with a series of characters continually forced to the brink of despair, but desperate to pull them-selves back. Of the two films collected on this disk, The Promise is the one that makes the greatest impact. The Dardenne’s here create a world that isn’t a million-miles away from the current social climate in the UK, with building sites, smoky pubs and migrant workers peppering what is essentially the typical rites-of-passage/coming of age movie so loved by Hollywood. The brothers rest their narrative firmly on the shoulders of young newcomer Jérémie Rénier as Igor, a young tear-away forced into looking after a young black mother and her baby following the death of the woman’s husband whilst working for the company run by Igor’s father...

The brothers season the film with lots of moralistic issues such as the passage into adulthood, immigration, and domestic abuse, whilst at the centre of it all, featuring a touching father son relationship between Igor and his disparate dad (played here by award winning actor and regular Dardenne collaborator Olivier Gourmet). The second film, and the one that garnered the most attention when first shown at the Cannes film festival back in 1999 is Rosetta, a less successful continuation of the themes of La Promesse, featuring the brilliant Emilie Dequenne as a troubled young teenager desperately searching the Belgium ghettos for work, whilst also having to put up with an alcoholic mother, a lecherous landlord and a series of ignorant civil servants. The use of handheld cameras and jarring jump-cuts is greater this time around with the brothers seemingly intent on alienating the viewer, but also, expressionistically conveying the lead protagonist’s sense of cultural dislocation and alienation from the world around her...

As that final paragraph might suggest, Rosetta is a bleak, bleak film, prefiguring the likes of Dancer in the Dark or Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing... However, unlike those films, the Dardenne’s are unable to overcome the clichés of the narrative, and, instead of offering us a searing indictment, or protests against the mass-unemployment of provincial France and Belgium, simply end up re-hashing a million and one kitchen sink films from the decades before. At this price, this double disk set might prove a little too steep for viewers and, unlike the Promise, Rosetta is hardly required viewing. My advice would be, to try and pick up one or the other film separately, or failing that, if you already know and love Rosetta, then The Promise should not be a disappointment. At any rate, though the scenarios and some of the characterisations might, for lack of a better word, be seen a clichéd, the intensity of the performances and technical skill from all the actors, weather professional or not, is outstanding.

Dardennes do it again - Rosetta Review
Another fantastic film from the Dardenne brothers, the winner of the Palme D'Or in 1999. I wouldn't put it in the same category as L'Enfant or Les Silence De Lorna but all the same, a great film. No one does realism quite like the Dardennes in European cinema. At first the film is quite slow but the plot pulls its self together eventually and it shows a fantastic, fulfilling piece of cinema. It felt so realt that at times it was like I was watching a documentary. Another key aspect for me was the absence of any type of soundtrack and although this only served to highlight the reality it still could have maybe done with some music to enhance the emotions a bit more. I think Rosetta's plight is one in which we can identify with but as a viewer I initially felt empathy with Rosetta but I lost this sense of empathy due to the decisions she made. For me, this reduction in empathy made it a great piece of work as it tended to avoid cliche and a usual plot you get in so many films. Fantastic, a very good 65%.