Critics reviews

The key difference is that Rosetta, unlike Mouchette, is no withering wallflower. She's portrayed, in a remarkable debut performance, by Émilie Dequenne, who split the Best Actress prize at Cannes with Séverine Caneele from L'humanité. Dequenne, whose soft, cherubic features belie her sometimes feral intensity, plays Rosetta as a force of pure determination, bounding from one short-lived job opportunity to the next.

Rosetta, whose dogged protagonist trudges from one odd job to another, is one of the all-time great films about work and how it consumes and shapes our lives as both a means of survival and a badge of identity. Put another way, few films have so vividly revealed the link between economic insecurity and existential terror.

When I saw it in New York for the first time a few months [after in screened at Cannes], it left an enormous roomful of filmgoers stunned and speechless. I was no exception. Rosetta is indeed a great film, but it has a fearsome unity, an unshakable commitment to rendering the contours of a destitute life and the ever present possibility of spiritual transformation, that are altogether uncommon, even within the Dardennes' formidable body of work.

Ultimately, [the Dardenne brothers'] films delicately balance chaos and order, unspoken tenuousness and silent expression. What makes Rosetta unique is its lead character's determination to reveal and destroy any hint of surrounding weakness threatening to subvert her singular direction in life.

Emily Dequenne's body... is like the engine of camera movement and framing. It is as though the Dardennes have handed the reigns over to this heavy-breathing whirlwind whose explosive movements create and become the limits of the visual frame. There is not a single moment in which Dequenne seems to have been placed in cinematic space by direction. Instead, the overwhelming impression is of Rosetta – both a physical and emotional force – driving the narrative and the form of the film.

This startlingly palpable expression of Rosetta's physical and emotional hardship is emblematic of the Dardennes' poetic style, one which repeatedly discovers resonance in the commonplace. In scrutinised minutiae the one-time documentarians find transcendental signs, in a way reminiscent of the work of Bresson (particularly Mouchette). Rosetta's struggle is literally embodied in her recurring stomach cramps (presumably period pains) and her wrestling bouts with Riquet...

Using very little dialogue and long, hand-held tracking shots (the relentlessly restless visuals perfectly reflect Rosetta's unsettled life, the secret to which is provided only halfway through the movie - and even then, subtly), the Dardennes never sentimentalise their heroine but respect the mysteries of her soul; the result is a film almost Bressonian in its rigour and power to touch the heart.

Rosetta is a grim character in a grim set of circumstances, yet the film's writer-directors, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, are so ruthlessly unsentimental, uncynical, and physical in their approach to her life that we experience it viscerally before we get a chance to reflect on its meaning.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne create an eviscerating, poignant, and unsettling portrait of poverty and survival in Rosetta. The jarring motion, quick panning, and unstable camerawork contribute to the film's pervasive sense of transience and uncertainty.

...There's scarcely a moment that doesn't ring true, and the jittery handheld camerawork is frequently stunning, but the virtuosity is in service of a vision so relentlessly deterministic that it's ultimately numbing... While [Dequenne's] performance is suitably naturalistic and remarkably disciplined, she's only asked to evince two emotions: rage and determination.

I saw Rosetta three weeks ago, and haven't recovered from it since... It moves me to the heart of my heart, this film about the necessity of life, the impossibility of morality, the soil of human experience. [A teaching colleague] told me that he couldn't watch it because he thought too much about [Robert Bresson's] Mouchette, but precisely, it's at last Mouchette today, our Mouchette, the one we deserve, without any heaven and any transcendence.