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67 True Grit Rosetta I saw Rosetta three weeks ago, and haven’t recovered from it since. In fact, I didn’t see any film since the Dardennes’, except films for work. 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. Her scream, ‘‘Mama! Y’a d’la boue! Y’a d’la boue!’’ [‘‘Mama! It’s full of mud! It’s full of mud!’’] haunts me, I can’t forget it, it’s exactly the despair of being in life without any pathos, any margin, just real life in the immediacy of the impulse. —e-mail from film critic Nicole Brenez The 80s practically ended with the euphoric takeover of Tiananmen Square by more than a million demonstrators led by students, many with access to fax machines, though a brutal government crackdown followed. And the 90s ended with the disruption of the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Seattle by an extremely diverse coalition formed through e-mail. It wasn’t a throwback to the 60s—we’re living in an era of greater economic disparities, where class is in some ways becoming a more significant distinction than nationality or language—but at least it suggested that people aren’t powerless and sometimes can triumph over the designs of multinational corporations. Forms of communication are no longer shaped by cold-war prototypes. Products and operations rather than national ideologies have made much of the world kin, and those products and operations function less like the front line of an invading army than like a long highway anyone can travel down—which may make them destroyers of national ideologies. Even the multinationals are changing. Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald ’s outlets in Japan aren’t simply or necessarily promoting the American way of life. They sell corn soup at McDonald’s in Tokyo—which means they’re using American decor to sell a Japanese product and thereby promoting the Japanese way of life. Which isn’t to say that way of life hasn’t changed; who’s to say what the Japanese way of life is anymore? Hot cans of corn soup and of Pokka espresso are sold everywhere in Japanese vending machines. Pokka is brewed in American 68 ESSENTIAL CINEMA Canyon, California (though if you want to buy it in Chicago you have to go to an Asian supermarket), and the Pokka people can hardly be said to be promoting an Italian way of life. All of this is a roundabout way of underscoring my point that it’s silly for the mainstream American press to go on assuming that foreign movies are neither relevant to American audiences nor important. Rosetta, a Belgian film that’s starting its second and final week at the Music Box, won the top prize at Cannes, and its eighteen-year-old lead, Emilie Dequenne, shared the best actress award. Its story, subject, and heroine are probably more relevant to the lives of most Americans—and have more physical presence and pack a bigger emotional punch—than the story, subject, and characters of most current Hollywood films. Nevertheless, most American critics have refused to give this current American release even a fraction of the attention they lavish on any American movie. An American friend who recently returned from Europe told me Rosetta has already inspired a new Belgian law known as ‘‘Plan Rosetta,’’ which prohibits employers from paying teenage workers less than the minimum wage (a Belgian news source on the Internet reports this passed on November 12). But the American press hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, considered this fact worth reporting. What can we conclude from the passing of this law? One person at a discussion following a preview thought it meant that European moviegoers are more serious than their American counterparts, but I disagree. I think the different impact a movie like Rosetta has in Europe is mainly a consequence of how it’s treated by the press. For instance, Dequenne appeared on the cover of France’s leading rock weekly late last September, but she could never conceivably appear on the cover of Spin or Rolling Stone. The film’s...

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