Dardenne & Dardenne: Rosetta (1999)

For the Dardennes, Seraing, Belgium means something like what Flint, Michigan means to Michael Moore – a declining industrial node, it’s a centre of dark forces, releasing the vast, undifferentiated labor-power of the universe as it decays. And the Dardennes’ purest vision, Rosetta, is also their most distilled portrait of their home town, presenting us with an economic premise more than a narrative premise, the mere precondition for late capitalism, as Rosetta, played by Emilie Dequenne in a Cannes-winning role, traverses Seraing in a search for subsistence employment that can never come. For the most part, the camera never moves beyond the orbit of Rosetta’s immediate awareness, usually following her but sometimes circling around her, as she continually attempts to incorporate objects and scenarios into her purview, in a perceptual tug-of-war with her overseers and exploiters. Less a stream of consciousness than a stream of sensation, its kinaesthetic immediacy leaves even The Promise miles behind, to the point where Rosetta’s more an avatar than a character, ancestor of the first-person shooters of The Kid with a Bike.  In the process, the vast wind-tunnels of The Promise segue into a version of Seraing where gravity seems to operate with heightened intensity, requiring the most extraordinary propulsive energy to avoid being grounded, prostrated, even as the ground sometimes seems like the only thing to cling to, the only thing that’s not in continual flux. And even as Rosetta keeps moving, jacking in to the city’s vast slipstreams to conserve energy, she still finds herself propelled into other propulsions, floored by sudden gusts of gravity that bring everyone to their knees. Merciless in its critique and infinite in its sympathy, it’s the Dardennes’ masterpiece of masterpieces, utterly dissolving itself into their desperation, touched with didactic naturalism.