In the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian social realist brothers who specialise in studies of life on the breadline, a roving hand-held camera tends to cling to the main character as closely as a shadow. Rosetta (1999), their first picture to feature a female protagonist, follows a tenacious, single-minded teenager who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother on the edge of the desolate town of Seraing. She scratches around for work, poaches fish from a muddy river using worms scooped from the ground as bait and is not above betrayal and back-stabbing to get what she wants, even if it is just a job at a local waffle stand.
The picture was compared favourably to Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967). The brothers described it as “a war film” and Rosetta herself as “a warrior”. Jean-Pierre pointed out that the characters “are always responsible for what they do or don’t do. We don’t treat any of [them] like victims.”
