Chris Knipp
01-30-2025, 11:14 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20rse.jpg
FRANÇOISE FABIAN IN ROSE
AURÉLIE SAADA: ROSE (2024)
The late-blooming widow
A French widow of Moroccan Jewish bckground gets a new lease on life in this lightweight but cheerful picture. Her trajectory isn't without its ups and downs. At first her husband Philippe (Bernard Murat), before a rousing rendintion of the Israeli-related song "Hava Nagila" (הבה נגילה), begs Rose to have a drink with him. She insists on apricot juice. Perhaps she's wise because shortly thereafter, he's no longer around. He'already known at the party about his lousy MRI from their son Pierre (Grégory Montel), the doctor. The message already is: last gasps are good. In fact, for a first film, this relies surprisingly much on cliches and the oly reason for watching it is to see the warm performance of Françoise Fabian in the lead. When you learn that Fabian played Maude in Éric Rohmer's classic My Night at Maud's, you realize what deep funds of femininity and sexiness she might draw on - at least were the script to provide the material. It doesn't, really; but just Fabian's presence and aura may suffice for some viewers.
The film gets busy early on acquainting us with Rose's children. As she later describes them, one, Sarah (Aure Atika) "is still in love with her half-wit of an ex-husband," Nicolas (Mehdi Nebbou); another, the kippa-wearing medical man Pierre, has "gone religious"; and the third, Léon (Damien Chapelle), who still hangs around the roomy bourgeois parental apartment, "thinks he's married" to her. This information Rose gives to a perhaps more important character: the proprietor of the nearby cafe (Le Bellerive, in the 19e, if you're interested). His name is Laurent (Pascal Elbé), and to him she can be completely frank. He solves the problem of her desire to drink now: he pours her favorite abricot juice with a shot of vodka, and shares three drinks with her.
This is the first interesting scene, and it comes at the end of an hour. Saada has shown some ability to stage family gatherings, up to then, but the film isn't particularly going anywhere, though some will like this bit of a portrait of a Sephardic Jewish family; in fact veteran Variety critic Jay Weissberg suggested in his Rome-penned Locarno Festival review (https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/rose-review-1235034791/) that this film's "all-embracing effusion of Jewishness," both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, will assure "an easy sell across the Atlantic." The actor playing the barman, by the way, like Fabian, is also of French-Algerian-Jewish background: they match, though despite his grizzled look, and perhaps he is meaant to be older, the actor himself is 57, while Fabian hereself is actually 91, though Rose says she's 78.
When Rose and Laurent dance after those drinks Oriental style, in the bar alone late on a Monday night, they do it right and it's sexy, and when they kiss, it feels okay too. This little evening really brings Rose back to life. It hasn't been as great as the bar secquence in Denis' 35 Shots of Rum, of chracters in an after hours cafe dancing to a calypso version of "Siboney" and the Commodores song "Nightshift." How could anything come close to the most enveloping, enchanting scene in one of the great Claire Denis' warmest films? But it's somewhere in the ballpark, and this is one of two or three moments where singer-tured-director Saada really shines, with simplicity, a classic setting, and a whiff of late-life romance.
Of course Léon and Sarah, who are simnplistically written, don't understnd Rose's revived interest in life at all. They think it's perverse and crazy in some way. In this reaciton in a sense they represent the world at large, where someone close to 80 who's still excited by life is likely to be thought cracked. But Rose goes back to the cafe and joins another table, giving out the makroudh Magrebi date-nut pastries she has made for Laurent but withdrew when it apppeared that he mught be with his own adult children. Baking the pastries, she danced again, listening to an Arabic love song. The Arabic music brings back her youth.
With the new people she has joined on the cafe terasse Rose has fun and drinks too much. And then she gets tipsy and when she gets home has a fall, and the filmmaker gives Fabien, as Rose, a somewhat mendering final defensive speech to her three adult children. We see only her and it's as if she's talking to the audience, as their surrogates. This is true to Fabian's central importance: this movie is essentially her. But the writing isn't good enough to move us or to sum up the film. We have to reach back to the cafe scene sharing the makroudh pastries, or before that to the scene where she cooks them and sways to the music, or before that to when she connects with Laurent in the bar and dances with him, for moments that make this late-life revival story come to life. The speech is just a mission statement. It's showing, not telling.
Rose, 102 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 5, 2021, showed at three small French festivals, three Jewish festivals in the US, and opened Dec. 8, 2021 in France where its AlloCinee press rating is 72% the sperctator score 56%. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/rose/) rating: 63%. Rose opened at Quad Cinema NYC Jan. 24, and at Opera Plaza San Francisco Jan. 31
FRANÇOISE FABIAN IN ROSE
AURÉLIE SAADA: ROSE (2024)
The late-blooming widow
A French widow of Moroccan Jewish bckground gets a new lease on life in this lightweight but cheerful picture. Her trajectory isn't without its ups and downs. At first her husband Philippe (Bernard Murat), before a rousing rendintion of the Israeli-related song "Hava Nagila" (הבה נגילה), begs Rose to have a drink with him. She insists on apricot juice. Perhaps she's wise because shortly thereafter, he's no longer around. He'already known at the party about his lousy MRI from their son Pierre (Grégory Montel), the doctor. The message already is: last gasps are good. In fact, for a first film, this relies surprisingly much on cliches and the oly reason for watching it is to see the warm performance of Françoise Fabian in the lead. When you learn that Fabian played Maude in Éric Rohmer's classic My Night at Maud's, you realize what deep funds of femininity and sexiness she might draw on - at least were the script to provide the material. It doesn't, really; but just Fabian's presence and aura may suffice for some viewers.
The film gets busy early on acquainting us with Rose's children. As she later describes them, one, Sarah (Aure Atika) "is still in love with her half-wit of an ex-husband," Nicolas (Mehdi Nebbou); another, the kippa-wearing medical man Pierre, has "gone religious"; and the third, Léon (Damien Chapelle), who still hangs around the roomy bourgeois parental apartment, "thinks he's married" to her. This information Rose gives to a perhaps more important character: the proprietor of the nearby cafe (Le Bellerive, in the 19e, if you're interested). His name is Laurent (Pascal Elbé), and to him she can be completely frank. He solves the problem of her desire to drink now: he pours her favorite abricot juice with a shot of vodka, and shares three drinks with her.
This is the first interesting scene, and it comes at the end of an hour. Saada has shown some ability to stage family gatherings, up to then, but the film isn't particularly going anywhere, though some will like this bit of a portrait of a Sephardic Jewish family; in fact veteran Variety critic Jay Weissberg suggested in his Rome-penned Locarno Festival review (https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/rose-review-1235034791/) that this film's "all-embracing effusion of Jewishness," both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, will assure "an easy sell across the Atlantic." The actor playing the barman, by the way, like Fabian, is also of French-Algerian-Jewish background: they match, though despite his grizzled look, and perhaps he is meaant to be older, the actor himself is 57, while Fabian hereself is actually 91, though Rose says she's 78.
When Rose and Laurent dance after those drinks Oriental style, in the bar alone late on a Monday night, they do it right and it's sexy, and when they kiss, it feels okay too. This little evening really brings Rose back to life. It hasn't been as great as the bar secquence in Denis' 35 Shots of Rum, of chracters in an after hours cafe dancing to a calypso version of "Siboney" and the Commodores song "Nightshift." How could anything come close to the most enveloping, enchanting scene in one of the great Claire Denis' warmest films? But it's somewhere in the ballpark, and this is one of two or three moments where singer-tured-director Saada really shines, with simplicity, a classic setting, and a whiff of late-life romance.
Of course Léon and Sarah, who are simnplistically written, don't understnd Rose's revived interest in life at all. They think it's perverse and crazy in some way. In this reaciton in a sense they represent the world at large, where someone close to 80 who's still excited by life is likely to be thought cracked. But Rose goes back to the cafe and joins another table, giving out the makroudh Magrebi date-nut pastries she has made for Laurent but withdrew when it apppeared that he mught be with his own adult children. Baking the pastries, she danced again, listening to an Arabic love song. The Arabic music brings back her youth.
With the new people she has joined on the cafe terasse Rose has fun and drinks too much. And then she gets tipsy and when she gets home has a fall, and the filmmaker gives Fabien, as Rose, a somewhat mendering final defensive speech to her three adult children. We see only her and it's as if she's talking to the audience, as their surrogates. This is true to Fabian's central importance: this movie is essentially her. But the writing isn't good enough to move us or to sum up the film. We have to reach back to the cafe scene sharing the makroudh pastries, or before that to the scene where she cooks them and sways to the music, or before that to when she connects with Laurent in the bar and dances with him, for moments that make this late-life revival story come to life. The speech is just a mission statement. It's showing, not telling.
Rose, 102 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 5, 2021, showed at three small French festivals, three Jewish festivals in the US, and opened Dec. 8, 2021 in France where its AlloCinee press rating is 72% the sperctator score 56%. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/rose/) rating: 63%. Rose opened at Quad Cinema NYC Jan. 24, and at Opera Plaza San Francisco Jan. 31