France, 1870. Young Rosalie is hiding a secret. Since her birth, her body and face have been covered with hair. She was a bearded woman but never wanted to become a carnival attraction. One day, a debt-ridden café owner decides to marry her for the dowry, but he rejects her when he discovers the truth. But Rosalie is a brave and intelligent girl, ready to take on the world.
Stephanie Di Giusto loves to tell stories about strong, independent women. Her debut, La Danseuse, was a biography of Loïe Fuller, the woman who revolutionized dance in the early 1900s and faced life with freedom and torment.
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Rosalie is a character of even more significant impact, whose defiance of the provincial bourgeois world is still highly relevant today. Di Giusto thus stages a modern and contemporary film with well-written characters and a fluid narrative that accompanies the progressive torment of the protagonist, excellently played by Nadia Tereszkiewicz, a young and very talented actress, already seen last season in Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Forever Young and Francois Ozon’s Mon Crime.
By her side is Benoit Magimel, who has become one of the best French actors of these years, with excellent stage presence and perfect timing.
Rosalie unfortunately suffers from tightness, as in her previous Stephanie Di Giusto fails to maintain the right balance, and the last third of the film suffers from a lack of coherence. Di Giusto would like to convey the pain of being different and not accepted as a woman, but she does so with haste dictated by an excessive dilation of the previous two acts.
Too bad, because overall, this is a step forward from her debut, but it suffers, albeit to a lesser extent, from the same flaws.