Rosetta

The Dardennes are the clearest inheritors neorealism has. De Sica's rules are theirs: shoot on the real streets, cast a non-professional in the lead, build the whole film on one small economic problem, and refuse the music and the lighting that would tell an audience how to feel. Rosetta keeps a girl's job as the entire plot the way Bicycle Thieves keeps a bicycle as the entire plot, and both end without resolving the thing they are about. The difference is the camera. De Sica watches from a distance; the Dardennes put a handheld lens on the back of Rosetta's head and stay there. Filed MEDIUM: a tradition carried forward rather than one film answering another. The film's real-world consequence, the Belgian law on youth wages named after it, is already recorded separately.

The film changed Belgian law. After Rosetta, Belgium passed a youth employment measure that the press named the Rosetta Plan, which is about as direct as the relationship between a film and a social fact gets. Its subject is a seventeen-year-old living in a caravan with an alcoholic mother, fighting for a job that pays almost nothing, and the Dardennes film it as pursuit: handheld, close, no music, and no scene in which anyone explains her situation to her. The thing it is about is not poverty in general but the specific arithmetic of a trial contract, a waffle stand and a job that only exists if somebody else loses theirs, which is why the ending turns on Rosetta reporting a friend.