One could imagine Terry Gilliam or the late Ken Russell turning a film on the original bearded lady into a raucous, profane vaudeville. Stéphanie di Giusto, French director of the admired La Danseuse, moves in a very different direction with this attractive period drama. Drenched in the damp light of rural Brittany, the film has the quality of a lost Balzac tale. An inward-looking rural community. A hard-bitten cafe owner. A woman striving to shake off prejudice. The writing loses its way in the final half-hour, but Rosalie does a decent job of working feminist concerns in with the old-school values of prestige French cinema.
“Original bearded lady” is not quite right. Hypertrichosis in women has been noted throughout human history, but Clémentine Delait, who ran the Café de La Femme à Barbe, in northeastern France, at the start of the last century, has become an icon for those properly unashamed by the condition. The screenplay stays close to the opening throat-clears of Clémentine’s story before weaving off on its own curious path. Abel Deluc (Benoît Magimel), a cafe owner in horrible debt, agrees to marry Rosalie (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), largely to get hold of a generous dowry. After some evasion on her part he discovers her body is covered in a noticeable mat of hair. He then learns she has been shaving her face to meet conventional ideals of beauty.
Rosalie subsequently grows her beard largely for a bet – as did Clémentine Delait – and finds that the cafe profits from her supposed oddness. It hardly needs to be said that impediments soon emerge. The local factory owner, a top-hatted capitalist of the old school, does everything possible to turn the town against her. A fire at his property helps him in that endeavour. Leaning a little too implausibly towards 21st-century plot mechanics, the film finds revealing photographs of Rosalie emerging to lower her further in the estimation of bigots.
All that soapy stuff keeps the action bubbling towards a final reckoning between husband and wife. Here the film, well reviewed at Cannes last year, is at its strongest. Tereszkiewicz and Magimel give us a pair without the language to negotiate emotional crises that contemporaneous society would prefer to keep repressed. The final catharsis is moving and plausible. Rural life is represented with some elegance.
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