In order to attract more customers to her husband’s café, a young bride with hirsutism grows a beard.
After devoting a biographical drama to Loïe Fuller, muse of the Lumière brothers and rival of Isadora Duncan, Stéphanie Di Giusto (The dancer2016) was freely inspired by the fate of Clémentine Delait (1865-1939), bar owner, bearded lady and mascot of the Poilus during the First World War, in order to create a female character thirsty for love and animated by an unshakeable faith.
Written with Sandrine Le Coustumer, based on a treatment that the latter signed with Alexandra Echkenazi, Rosalie transports us to France humiliated by the Franco-Prussian war, to a small Breton town, where Barcelin (Benjamin Biolay), director of the textile factory, reigns as a despot. Wounded in war, Abel (Benoît Magimel) runs a café at arm’s length where customers are too rare. In the hope of repaying a large sum to Barcelin, Abel marries Rosalie (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) with the complicity of the latter’s father (Gustave Kevern).
Lovely, educated, gifted at sewing and other household arts, Rosalie hides a dark secret from her husband: since birth, she has suffered from hirsutism. Abel loses his temper when he discovers the hair covering the body of the young bride, who dreams of raising a family. Refusing to let herself be discouraged, Rosalie will work to bring customers back to the café. For this, she will grow a beard.
Through this luminous portrait of a woman swimming against the tide of society, Stéphanie Di Giusto delivers a moving ode to difference and freedom, nevertheless tinged with a somewhat outdated and melodramatic romanticism. Thus, to the workers, some hostile, others without will of their own, who seem straight out of a Zola novel, the director opposes a heroine bordering on angelism at times. Likewise, the period reconstruction shows a village that is almost too clean and too smooth, threatening to transform the whole thing into a gallery of images of Epinal.
Carried by the grace of Nadia Tereszkiewicz, a clever mix of naivety, sensuality and recklessness, Rosalie However, it manages to make captivating the evolution of the cursed couple formed by the young woman with the beard and her rigid and cold husband, played with sobriety by Benoît Magimel. At a time when so many young people are submitting to the dictates of beauty to the point of becoming clones of celebrities ruling social networks, Rosalie proves to be an irresistible breath of freshness.
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Drama
Rosalie
Stephanie Di Giusto
Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay
1:55 a.m.