Rosetta (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 1999)

17-year-old Rosetta lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother and no real prospects of changing her situation. Her sole focus is on finding a job, with which successive employers let her down due to her age, and her living circumstances mean that the state fails to help her either through providing benefits. She marches on, grimly determined and forced to be prematurely resourceful just to keep above water.
The Dardenne brothers have always had an overriding concern with what happens to people on the bottom rung of society, and while the pervading, claustrophobic gloom here could be critiqued for being excessive, to the extent that they seem to have gone out of their way to film only under grey skies, their righteous passion has to be respected. Making the protagonist so introverted, guarded and single-minded risks making her wholly unsympathetic, as we only see her express emotion as desperation when being ejected from another job, but the truth of the character cannot be denied and the final image of the film, not promising a light at the end of the tunnel but rather just laying bare her soul, hits with unexpected power.

7/10