MOVIE REVIEW

A moving but austere work of social realism, “Rosetta” won the Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year. This Belgian-French co-production is bleak, demanding stuff, and its hand-held documentary-style photography is harder on the stomach than “The Blair Witch Project.”

But newcomer Emilie Duquenne gives an extraordinary performance as the title character, a Belgian teenage girl whose character has been deformed by poverty and unemployment.

Rosetta is 17 and lives in a trailer park at the edge of a drab, rainy Belgian city. She has lanky hair, bad skin and an alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux) who prostitutes herself to the guy who runs the trailer park (Bernard Marbaix).

You first meet Rosetta as she’s being fired from a job. She refuses to leave the factory and has to be dragged out, kicking and biting, by police officers. Afterwards, when she’s not looking for work, Rosetta fishes in the swampy pond behind the trailer park using traps made from old bottles. Every so often she doubles over in pain from a presumably stress-related stomach ailment.

Finally, Rosetta gets a job at a bakery. Then a young man (Fabrizio Rongione) who works at one of the baker’s waffle stands befriends her, despite her distrustful unfriendliness. But Rosetta is let go when her employer’s son says he wants her job.

Her single-minded dedication to finding work – and through it, some stability and dignity in her life – then prompts Rosetta to commit an appalling act of betrayal.

Writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are leftist documentarians who also made the critically acclaimed feature “La Promesse.” Although their “Rosetta” could be seen as a Marxist tract, it goes beyond agitprop.

It implies that even the most menial work fulfills a deep emotional need, and it shows in a powerful, personal way that widespread youth unemployment – the price that countries like Belgium and France pay for their semi-socialist economies – extorts a terrible psychic cost.