The Dardenne Brothers at Cannes: "We Want to Make It Live" (Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne) (Interview‪)‬

Imagine a movie that begins with a scuffle, an adult struggling with an adolescent, a scene that does not denote danger but a scream of anarchy. Imagine the movie continuing as a jerky episodic depiction of this conflict, a conflict that assumes the guise of adult versus child, child versus society, and child versus self. Throughout, we lurch along with our protagonists, involved in their rough ride by the handheld camera, close-ups of silent brooding faces, and the "music" of urban travel--motorcars, buses, and mopeds--until some unexpected end. This would be a typical Dardenne brother movie. The two Belgian brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre (older by two years), established their forte as directors of a lively form of "realism" when they won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1999 with Rosetta, a fiction film that grew out of their experience shooting factory strikes in the industrial zone of Belgium. In Rosetta, we have a proletariat girl who struggles against the only home she has, her drunken mother's trailer existence in the mud. By hook and by crook, Rosetta tries to get "jobs" to survive, a battle for existence that seems to have no outcome but circularity. Throughout, she wrestles with her mother (literally in the mud), fends off employers who want to fire her, and struggles with a near-boyfriend who, despite his helpfulness, she betrays. Two struggles end with someone dunked in the water, a metaphor of a forced "baptism" that does not result in new life, although rebirth was, it is clear, Rosetta's aim.