 |
| Images courtesy of New Yorker Films |
Belgian film writer-director and teacher Patrice Toye isn’t
well known in the global film community but has nevertheless maintained a
steady output of stirring dramas usually about disaffected or delinquent youths
since the early 1990s. Still working
today including on an upcoming project still trained on the morally nebulous arena
of adolescence, Toye’s filmography is posited somewhere between the youth
experience of François Truffaut and the contemporary Eastern European
alienation of Lukas Moodysson. Her first
real screen breakthrough arrived in 1998 with her disturbing adolescent character
study Rosie, a film originally picked up for New Yorker Films for US
theatrical distribution and videotape release that has long since been lost to
time. Without a DVD or digital release
to speak of save for some VHS cassettes still kicking around, what exactly is
this scrappy gritty Flemish language female driven coming-of-age drama? A difficult, intentionally troubling
character study whose closest antecedent is undeniably Peter Jackson’s still
searing Heavenly Creatures.
Thirteen-year-old Rosie (Aranka Coppens) has just been
placed in a reform school for young girls.
What actions could’ve landed her here?
Through a series of flashbacks both real and largely imaginary, we join
with Rosie on her self-reflexive journey inward trying to make sense of her
situation. Zeroing in on her dysfunctional,
impoverished and broken home life, we find Rosie living with her twenty-seven-year-old
“sister” Irene (Sara de Roo) who is in fact her biological mother but that’s
their little secret. Hovering over them
is Irene’s deadbeat gambling addict brother Michel (Frank Vercruyssen) who
himself has a dubious history with them.
However when Irene meets and takes a liking to well-to-do Bernard (Dirk
Roofthooft), it leaves Rosie feeling lonely and jealous. On a chance bus meeting with a young punk
teen named Jimi (Joose Wynant), Rosie starts acting out and getting into
trouble leading towards her current stint in juvie hall. Cross-cutting back and forth between her
present situation and the actions that led her there, it becomes an
increasingly disturbing portrait of the impact a dysfunctional situation can
have on a minor and how people can mix fantasy and reality together to cope.
Heartbreaking, occasionally harrowing and often hard to look
at, Patrice Toye’s Rosie is something of an elliptical, Malick-y
tapestry of gloomy impoverished youth growing up too fast in a broken home and
the degrees with which children will do anything to get the attention of
others. When the titular Rosie is
largely ignored by Irene who prefers they maintain that they’re sisters, she pours
all her energies into trying to form some kind of connection with Jimi including
dolling herself up with makeup like an underage prostitute. It could well have ballooned into exploitative
fare but Patrice Toye keeps the situation innocent and from the misaligned perspective
of Rosie who is caught in a difficult transitional period between childhood and
young adulthood. Much of the film’s
gloomy power arises from Love & Friendship cinematographer Richard
Van Oosterhout’s ornate camerawork of squalid industrial environments such as
her apartment building and the barren landscapes and train tracks of Belgium. Then there’s Past Imperfect composer
and The Sum of All Fears songwriter John Parish’s moody soundtrack which
underscores the film’s somber environment.
Aranka Coppens the young actress cast in the lead role of Rosie
never acted again following this film, instead vowing to become a kindergarten
schoolteacher later in life. Despite
this, she gives a once-in-a-lifetime performance of a troubled, possibly
sociopathic youth in a way that feels as naturalistic as Truffaut’s casting of Jean-Pierre
Léaud in The 400 Blows. From her
cold gaze to her embittered delivery, Coppens and Toye have created a complex,
needy character who isn’t necessarily evil but is absolutely the product of her
damaged upbringing and lack of parental guidance. Loft actress Sara de Roo as the
troubled Rosie’s mother does an excellent job of conveying how her own mistakes
and inattention to her daughter may have fostered her landing in juvie
hall. The actor undoubtedly with the
most heavy-lifting in this saga is Frank Vercruyssen as Michel, a man who
saunters in and out of Irene and Rosie’s life acting as a father figure but
mostly looking for another place to crash.
It could’ve been a simple black-and-white character but Vercruyssen and
Toye posit his character somewhere in the middle morally and contextually. You’re not inclined to dislike him but you
have your guard up about him also.
Much like the aforementioned Truffaut by way of the bleak
industrialism of Moodysson, Rosie became something of a festival
favorite. Winning a total of twelve
international film awards across Belgium, Norway, Seattle and Sochi, it
catapulted Patrice Toye into the pantheon of then-contemporary Belgian
directors to watch for. It also earned
its newcomer Aranka Coppens the Jean Carment award for Best Actress. With many US critics invariably comparing it
to Peter Jackson’s 1994 drama, Rosie was picked up by the now defunct New
Yorker Films company which distributed such world cinema classics as Aguirre,
the Wrath of God and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
in American movie houses. Looking back
on Rosie, the film that ignited Patrice Toye’s directing career remains
curiously unavailable to the viewing public outside of dormant tape
releases. A taut, provocative little
gem, Rosie won’t be for all tastes but for those lucky enough to catch
it wherever they can will find a most unusual portrait of the dysfunctional
family through the eyes of a child.
--Andrew Kotwicki
