Movie review | The bearded French woman defied chastity standards, and now she is played by a star of Finnish background

Drama

Rosalie, directed by Stéphanie Di Giusto. 115 min. K12.

★★★

In 1865 born Clémentine Delait was a bearded French woman who defied the chastity norms of the time, posed in erotic postcards, toured Europe and ran the “Bearded Woman’s Café” together with her baker husband.

French Stéphanie Di Giuston another feature film, Rosalie, takes momentum from Delait’s story. The film is placed in the continuum of epochal films that shed light on the history of the rainbow, where the contrasting colors of the image of the times, thought to be restrained, get the attention they deserve.

Nuori Rosalie (Finnish-French rising actress Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is married to Abel (Benoît Magimel). The sad-eyed father hastily lists his daughter’s good points in the dimness of the kitchen. Abel is neither rich nor handsome, but still a man. And Rosalie is a woman, a woman. The anxious father repeats it like a spell. Accept your female part, he vows.

On the wedding night, the truth is revealed when Abel opens his bride’s dress. Rosalie suffers from hirsutism, a male pattern of excessive hair growth.

Rejection is avoided when Rosalie gets an idea. Debt-ridden Abel’s arrears might be paid off if people are lured into the groovy to marvel at the bearded woman.

Historically the film takes no chances. The drama progresses from despair to insight, momentary intoxication, humiliation and new despair. There is an attempt to love and accept, but the control of the community is suffocating. The old power sits firmly in the rich pohata (Benjamin Biolay) in a heavy-handed character.

A closed, ecstatic community has been a recipe for success in many horror films. Where, for example, Get Out (2017) and Midsummer (2019) made the most of the creepiness of the community, Rosalie does not lean towards horror, even though she flirts with the idea in her pictures.

Sometimes it reminds me of a movie Yorgos Lanthimos A film set in the 18th century British court The Favourite (2018). Forbidden desire, stretching of norms and indirect use of power occur in both.

The motive is hunting and stuffed animals Rosalie that The Favourites at the core. A society that abhors a financially active, bearded, loud, openly erotic or determined woman considers it perfectly normal to have stuffed birds on top of hats and deer heads on the wall of the dinner room. The tamed animal is on display, harmless and admired.

Music will be heard In Rosalie little. The auditory picture is filled with the rustling and echoes of the chambers in the corners. Constant is the sound of breathing: rasping, throbbing and extreme, it is a sign of desire, anxiety, fear, pain and expectation.

Rosalie’s self-destruction is pictorially familiar from the English Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the 19th century. By Sir John Everett Millais Ofelia drowning in the middle of flowers (1851), has been adapted in films several times, and no Rosalie be the exception.

More interesting than Rosalie’s unconventionality or the tension between norms, self-expression and self-destruction is Rosalie and Abel’s relationship. An arranged marriage is not a romance. It also doesn’t turn out to be a violent prison that could deepen Rosalie’s plight. Both Rosalie’s and Abel’s characters are allowed to emerge in different ways, painful and awkward, inappropriate and desirable. Tension is created by insecurity, shame and empathy instead of passion.

The friendship that sprouts from unlikely circumstances and parallel tragedies is seen so precisely that it even allows for a melodramatic climax at the end.

Written by Stéphanie Di Giusto, Sandrine Le Coustumer, starring Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Benoit Magimel, Benjamin Biolay, Guillaume Gouix.