Rosalie – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Stéphanie Di Giusto
Writers – Romain Compingt, Stéphanie Di Giusto, Alexandra Echkenazi
Stars – Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay

In 1631 one of the most celebrated artists in Italy, the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), painted a striking portrait, Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son (Fondación Casa Ducale de Medinaceli).  Now on view in the Prado, it is striking, to say the least, depicting as it shows a fully-bearded woman breastfeeding an infant with, unusually for the time, her fashionably dressed and neatly-bearded husband relegated to the shadows.  The portrait is forceful on any number of levels, not least in the direct, almost confrontational, gaze of the subject directly at the viewer.  As if upending the concept of the much-interrogated male gaze, Magdalena looks directly at us. The so-called male gaze now staring at what for all intent and purposes appears to be a male, albeit breastfeeding.

Such a challenge to our presumptions and prejudices underpins the narrative in this almost elegiac tale of the plight of one such bearded lady in more recent times, well the 1870s!  The victim of an arranged marriage, or more accurately a marriage supported by a financial bribe or inducement the heroine, Rosalie, arrives to meet her intended husband, Abel.  Attractive and engaging, she nonetheless harbours a secret that has dominated her life – she suffers from hirsutism, a recognised medical condition, where the female body is covered in hair.  Treatable today, if not quite curable, it was a cruel fate for sufferers in past times.  The cry of “roll up, roll up to see the Bearded Lady” was a staple of freak show circuses down through the centuries, especially in the nineteenth, when all sorts of unfortunate and indeed indigenous peoples were put on display. Think of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980).

In this instance, the husband Abel gets more than he bargained for when he begins to undress his trophy wife.  Already damaged by his experiences in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he is emotionally vulnerable, financially compromised and in debt. In contrast to his recoiling in horror, his new wife is immediately in love with him, a love that only deepens over time. She, like Magdalena Ventura centuries earlier, is confident and confronts the prejudices of her husband and community, eventually turning his failing café into a successful business open to all, as the community also accept her as she is.  Of course, with success and acceptance comes criticism and fear from others.  And so her fortunes are mixed and troubled.

We follow this journey and as with the husband, the viewer becomes more accepting of Rosalie, as a woman and an individual.  Hair, so important to how we present ourselves in public, ceases to have resonance and we instead engage with Rosalie, a woman passionately in love.  Seeing through difference and otherness we may confront our own prejudices and see the person beneath the external veneer.